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The first time Shane met him, it was snowing.
Word of the storm arrived a few days prior, aligning perfectly with Shane’s prediction. In fact, he’d been hauling his satchel back from a foraging trip when the news started spreading.
Like the other shops in town, he’d been swarmed for the past few days with all sorts of requests from the nervous stockpiling townspeople; mostly advances on people’s regular aids and tonics, out of fear they’d be shut-in for too long to replenish them. Thyme and horehound tinctures for the cough dock workers sported this time of winter were particularly popular; he always prepared them together, the earthy thyme overpowering the unpleasant smell of horehound until it dried.
Aside from his usual clients, there were many new faces, asking him for advice, cold salve, his popular teas, or even simple herbs as most of the basic suppliers in town had depleted their stocks in the pre-storm frenzy. His hard work of several years had been paying off, lately, word-of-mouth bringing in plenty of business.
He’d been prepared for this, of course. Shane collected a surplus of all the goods he thought most likely to sell out, and then some. The foraging had been pleasant; he enjoyed the scenery of his usual collection spots, the smell of the earth, the quiet stillness. Often on these trips Shane mused he’d be a painter in another life, one who might elegantly reflect such beauty as he saw in nature. He sketched often, making diagrams of herbs for his notes or, on quiet weeks when business was slow, he’d sit very still by the riverbank and take the likeness of animals as they drank. Most often, he drew the deer; they didn’t mind him, and when they did notice his presence, they stood still, making the perfect subject. What would it be like to make a living off something so simple and serene as beauty?
Shane didn’t usually dwell on the matter; his lot in life was to bottle and sell the beautiful things he found, to study them, make meaning out of healing. And this had its own list of merits. After days on his feet, he’d poured over the kettles in the back workroom of the shop for several nights straight through, anticipating the need to come, and he’d been proven right. It was satisfying, rising up to the reputation he’d built for himself as a promising apothecary in the largest port town within a week’s journey. It was nice to be relied on, and prove worthy of their trust.
It was also fucking exhausting.
The window of the storm materialized in front of him with a howling cry of wind. Shane gasped his first breath, heart racing despite the sleep lines he felt creasing his cheek. He blinked the room into existence, lit only by his waning lantern. The light reflected against the darkness outside, illuminating heavy snowfall, collecting for what must have been hours already. He’d closed up shop in the early evening, planning to finish a large batch of willow bark salve that would be in demand when people emerged from the storm in however many days time.
On the desk where he’d knocked out was a large text, old and weathered, crackled open down the center. He’d been reading as he waited, allowing himself a small, frivolous pastime as a reward for the long week; the worn text was fictitious, but interesting all the same. Despite the grounded nature of his work, one that was based on evidence and truth, Shane kept a private fascination with the supernatural; even if he was sure it was all ancient folklore.
That explained the dream that roused Shane from sleep; it was already a haze, but the feeling lingered, sticking to his skin, leaving the hairs at the nape of his neck damp with sweat. Something had been chasing him, in relentless pursuit between leafless trees until his lungs burned with winter air and exertion, until his knees buckled and the ground came up to greet him. Amorphous in the way only dreams were, that ‘something’ had consumed him. The pages of fantasy he’d been reading must have informed the gory scene; his ribs cracked open, wind whorling in the cavity of his chest, the contents bare and shining ruby-red like pomegranate seeds. Heated by his body, his blood melted the snow underneath.
Prickling with fear, Shane shook his head to no one, trying to dismiss the remnant feeling of predatory eyes on him. He ran a hand through his sleep-flattened hair, and surveyed his work.
By now, the salve had settled nicely into the rows of tins he’d prepared, and likely had been perfectly set for hours while he dozed off in front of them. Shane knew that he’d needed a break, that the sum total of ten hours of sleep over the past three days was unreasonable by any standard; but Shane was pointedly awful at giving himself things he needed. The frenzy of customers and lack of sleep finally caught up to him. Still, the ache in his muscles and fatigue over him were satisfying; it made him feel like he’d earned his success. At least he could be thankful the fire hadn’t gone out while he’d been sleeping.
Shane rubbed his eyes, stretching. He was annoyed at himself, knowing the far warmer sleeping furs were in his house a half-hour trek from the shop, but the spare bed he kept in the back room of the store would do fine, and he’d been wise to overstock firewood, even if he was still feeling the consequences of the heavy pack in his shoulders. He’d be alright here for a while. Holed up here or in his home didn’t make much difference, anyway; it wasn’t as if he was expecting any customers.
This thought was followed shortly by a knock at the front door.
With a start, Shane rose, automatically pacing to the door of his workroom. With his hand over the doorknob, a wave of unease washed over him, cold in his chest. It was late, deep into the night, the snowstorm raging. The shop had been closed for hours, and he had no reputation for urgent calls nor night visits; he knew his fair share about medicine, the basic things, but he was an apothecary, not a doctor. Did someone mean to rob the store? Maybe it was ridiculous, but Shane was often rewarded for following his instincts, not unlike the inkling he’d had about the storm approaching.
The knocking sounded again, a touch more frantic. Shane shook his head to ward off the grogginess. Once again, he was confronted with what he needed — to finish a full night’s sleep — and what he thought he should do; helping someone who needed healing. And, because Shane was awful at giving himself what he wanted, he rationalized putting his hand back on the doorknob. He should answer. He wasn’t a doctor, but he could clean or stitch or wrap basic injuries.
Besides, whoever was at the door at this hour in this weather was clearly desperate. How could a thief get anywhere with goods in this storm, anyway? And why would a thief knock? Yes, it was more likely someone needed help. Shane wasn’t cocky enough to call himself a household name, but if business recently was any indicator, he seemed well-liked by the townspeople, earning a reputation for reliability. If they didn’t know him by name, they recognized the bowl-and-snake symbol out front, matching the simpler pendant he kept around his neck, and the good intentions it implied. It would reflect poorly on Shane’s work to turn down anyone in need, and besides, the guilt would eat him alive if someone froze to death as a victim of his paranoia.
Out of respect to his instinct, he took his dark cloak from the hook on the wall and threw it over his shoulders, and grabbed the paring knife he’d been using for his herbal prep to hastily shove in his pocket. It was silly — Shane had no penchant for violence — but the manual parts of his job kept him sturdy, at least, left him thicker in the arms and shoulders, and the steady income kept him well fed. All to say, he wouldn’t be completely useless if someone tried to attack him.
Shane passed through the door into the main store in the dark, tracking by memory to the clerk’s desk to light an oil lamp on the way. The knocking had stopped, but as he approached the storefront window he could see the figure standing on the other side, making out more features as he got closer.
The figure was cloaked, so Shane could only make out an imposing frame — a bit taller than him, with broad shoulders — but not much else. Seeing the light, the figure regarded him and rattled the locked doorknob.
Apprehensive, shaking off sleep, Shane set the lantern down on the floor, drew the key from the ring on his belt and unlocked the front door. He kept his free hand hovering near his pocket, blinking rapidly a few times in reflex at the gust of frigid air that greeted him. With the door to the shop open, Shane was back to business.
“Sir, are you alright? It’s late, the shop is closed. Can I help you?” Shane asked, adopting the steady, clear voice he used for customers.
The man’s face was still mostly obscured by his hood in the dark, thrown into his face with the wind. It was a fine cloak, made of expensive-looking woolly material, with an intricate metal clasp. Shane didn’t recognize the crest etched into it.
His voice was deep, and he spoke with a smoothness that juxtaposed the brutal cold.
“You are witch doctor, yes?” he asked.
That phrasing was outdated, and quite the misnomer, but Shane wasn’t offended; this was a port town, so he got his fair share of encounters with foreign tongues. Additionally, the stranger spoke with a thick accent — the ‘w’ of witch dragging into a ‘v’ — that told him it was a mistranslation of some kind.
“Apothecary,” Shane corrected, consciously adding a polite smile, so it didn’t come off as rude. He asked again. “Can I help you?”
“Yes, this. I need help,” he paused for a moment, tilting his head, “I will pay.”
The money wasn’t Shane’s concern as much as he wondered about the man’s intentions. If he was ill, he didn't show it; if anything, he seemed unperturbed by the cold, not a hint of shiver or grating to his voice. So he was injured, then?
“I…” Shane hesitated, but the snow had dramatically decreased visibility, coming down in relentless sheets, and the wind swallowed all sound outside of a few feet radius. He supposed if the man intended to rob him, he would’ve already pushed past Shane when he unlocked the door. Or stabbed him, or something.
“May I come inside?”
This further dissuaded Shane from fear. He asked with cordial familiarity, as if he were a repeat, loyal customer; though Shane doubted that, because he would’ve recognized a voice like this. He didn’t press when Shane hesitated, or make a sudden move for the door. Shane couldn’t see the man’s face, but he’d been standing in the storm for heaven knew how long. There was no sign of a carriage or horse; snow already filled in the man's footprints. Maybe he wasn’t ill, but with the cold the storm would easily cyanose his fingertips anyway…
“Yeah — yes, sure, come in,” Shane said, and stepped aside to let the stranger enter.
The man sighed deeply as he crossed the threshold of the door, likely in relief at the warmth, and shrugged off his hood. Shane was standing behind him, intending to re-lock the door out of habit, but he stuttered the motion, his attention caught by the mess of dark, blonde curls the stranger revealed. They were unkempt in a particularly flawless way, apparently unperturbed by the hood and the wind and the snow. Shane dismissed the thought with a minute shake of his head as he locked the door.
When he turned back, the stranger was walking around the shop, browsing. Apparently, he was not discouraged by the dim light offered by the oil lamp Shane had picked up, dangling at his side. He kept an uncannily perfect posture, aside from his left hand, which was subtly hovering over his lower left abdomen, near his hip; an obvious tell of injury to Shane’s trained eye.
“Nice shop,” the man said, “I hear many good things about your work. You are owner, yes? Hollander?”
Shane was thankful the man was fluent; he’d worked with translators in the shop often, but there was no summoning one now. The accent was curious, though, and Shane couldn’t place it; somehow both melodic and sharp, a rolling staccato in the velvety timbre of his voice. Yes, he was sure he’d never heard it before.
The man studied at the far back wall, eyeing the rows of drying herbs. Well, he assumed that’s what the man was looking at — Shane knew they were there because he’d hung them up this morning, but it was far too dark to make them out from where he was standing.
“Yes, that’s me. And thank you.”
The wind howled outside, battering against the walls and front window. He was used to the store being well-populated, recently, and the quiet unnerved him. Shane cleared his throat,
“What can I help you with?” he asked.
“All business, hm?” the man replied. Shane might’ve mistaken it for rude, but the tone was easygoing. Disarming.
“I am hurt,” he answered, studying a glass case filled with containers of loose tea, “is big scratch, from animal. You can help with this?”
“Oh,” Shane relaxed some, happy to have something to work with, “of course. I’d have to see it, I’m not a doctor, really, but — is it bleeding? When did it happen?”
Shane set the lantern down on a countertop, waiting for the man’s response. He was already running his mind through the possibilities. He’d ask which animal first; sometimes animal scratches gave people an acute madness, and the results were… not pleasant. At this thought, Shane realized he still hadn’t seen the man’s face, which made him a bit uneasy.
“I must show you? To get medicine?” the man asked.
That was a familiar line of questioning, particularly from higher-profile customers who were afraid Shane would spread rumors of their weaknesses. Luckily for him, Shane had no reputation for such gossip; his reticent nature made him popular among the working and upper-class townspeople alike. No one liked a loudmouth.
“Yes, if that’s alright. If I don’t examine it, I won’t know if it’s infected or not, or how severe it is, so I won’t know how to treat — ”
“Is fine,” the man shrugged, “I don’t mind.”
He turned to join Shane in the lantern light. The man unfastened his luxurious cloak, his large hands working the ornate clasp open before setting the heavy fabric down on the counter. He took the stool beside Shane at the expansive countertop. With the lantern now inches away, Shane got his first proper look at the man’s face.
Well, proper was an exaggeration — Shane’s eyes widened at his initial glance, and he immediately flicked them away before he was caught staring. In his professional opinion, the man was singularly handsome. His were sharp features, all hard edges, a deep contour to his cheekbones, a rough line to his jaw, softened only by a few brown moles and spots scattered around his face. Shane’s hand twitched with a distinct urge to take his likeness; an urge typically elicited by specimens on his foraging trips. But this was not an unidentified taxa in the glen; it was like catching looks at the sun, testing how many seconds he could hold his gaze without being burned.
Shane did this a few more times, stealing glimpses of his face in flits of his eyes — the sharp bow of his upper lip, the crisp blue of his eyes — before he realized he should be useful while the injured man undressed himself. Shane’s ears pricked red with guilt; he’d hardly given the man a chance to warm up from the cold. Shane shook his head minutely, the gesture only for himself, warding off the bout of woolgathering.
Right. If it was an injury, best to be prompt. Shane stepped over to the other side of the counter, opening a series of drawers to retrieve a pair of clean cattle skin gloves, a bottle of antiseptic, and gauze bandages that he had prepared in a small tray and brought back around to the stranger.
The apothecary returned with supplies, donning the gloves. The man had removed a thick sweater and began to unbutton his shirt, the white cloth stained a concerning maroon on his lower left abdomen. It was impossible not to notice his build; he was toned to an impressive chisel, something out of his anatomy texts. Shane couldn’t imagine what job of physical labor could afford the man such a fine cloak. The shop made good money; he was more fortunate than others, but the majority of Shane’s earnings went right back into the shop.
Focus, focus. He stood a pace away, giving the wound a first look. In a few words, he’d described the injury accurately; it was indeed a big scratch, an angry, sharp gash in a set of four, tearing into his skin in parallel diagonal slashes from above his belly button down to somewhere on his hip, but the way he rested his hands in his lap blocked his view.
“Excuse me, but your arm is — would you mind?”
When Shane looked up at his face for a reply, the man was already staring back at him.
“Of course,” he said, opting to clasp both hands behind his back. Shane gave a small nod in thanks, though he furrowed his brow at the perfect posture of the gesture. Maybe he was a soldier? It would explain his build, but not much else.
Shane returned to his survey. The size of the injury was remarkable; the tail ends were covered by his fine-tailored trousers. Shane struggled to imagine the animal — unless this man had woken the sleeping bears and lived to tell about it, little else compared in size. With practiced effort, he bit back a gasp or look of shock that threatened to emerge instinctively, so as not to startle the man, but he didn’t sugarcoat his observation.
“This is a serious injury — I’m sorry, I wish I’d seen to it sooner — I’m surprised it’s not bleeding,” Shane said, though now that he mentioned it, the man hadn’t seemed panicked at all, relative to how ghastly the wound was. As if hearing his thoughts, the man replied casually, like there wasn’t a giant gash tearing at his abdomen.
“Is okay. I am here now,” he smiled, lopsided, “I am in good hands, yes?”
“Yes,” Shane did his best to conceal the cogs turning, a nagging curiosity starting to rear its head.
Shane sat at the adjacent stool and leaned over, eyebrows knit, as he noticed a blackness to the wounds. His assessment jumped to gangrene, but that wasn't right; it was far too clean and lacked the purulence of infection, and the placement in the center of his abdomen wouldn’t be cut off from blood flow any time soon, either. A deep, burnt shade of black traced the edges with precise demarcation. The thick border of the foreboding blackness spread a few inches out from any direction of the open skin. It stood out staunchly against the pale tone of his stomach.
And yet, it wasn’t bleeding. Incredible. Like nothing he’d ever seen. He leaned down further, closer, to get a better look. Right, his questions.
“Which animal did you say attacked you?”
“I didn’t,” the man replied, and offered no further information. Shane couldn’t elicit anything from his tone, or expression; he was decidedly impassive.
This did not deter Shane — fortunately for the stranger, he was curious now, his tiredness forgotten, and he would be at this until he worked it out. Upon further inspection, Shane slowly eliminated every possible source he could attribute to the blackened wounds. He wasn’t lying when he said he wasn’t a doctor, worlds away from anyone who could teach him, but he read enough books and studied to a point where he’d likely qualify; he could at least figure out if the wound would kill the man or not.
Yet every time he thought he was onto something, a blaring contradiction reared it's head. Several ideas had been dismissed by the man’s lack of feverishness, not a drop of sweat on his skin, not a clamminess either. And despite the escharotic quality, that bumpy texture resembling a scab, it was all bone dry, the edges flushed to the skin rather than raised and stuck-on. Paradoxically, the man didn't even seem to be in much pain.
There was no sign of the inky lesions — they were perfectly circumscribed, like a fine calligrapher's work — anywhere else on the man’s exposed skin, making hematogenous spread unlikely. Not for lack of checking; Shane dragged his eyes from the man’s neck down, lingering traitorously on the sharp ‘v’ ending his torso, disappearing behind the waistband of his pants.
Shane swallowed. Tried to focus. There was one theory that tied everything together well, too well, aside from the blaring issue of it being decidedly impossible. He felt ridiculous to even think of it, unprofessional to entertain the idea. Shane tried to remember exactly what he’d read, desperately looking for a contradiction, but there was none in his memory. Every characteristic he could think of was exactly as he'd read about in a book of fabrications and superstitions.
His job meant he knew how to keep a secret. Shane knew not to blink twice at desperate requests for parcels of tansy and wild ginger, knew not to question it when women with bruises came in cloaked and asking for bouquets of foxglove flowers. Despite his natural curiosity, he’d learned not to pry over the years, likely contributing to his trustworthy, discreet reputation.
So, when he realized the man’s injury was not quite an animal scratch, he bit his tongue.
He’d studied supernatural injuries before, to a frankly embarrassing degree, poring over texts with incorrigible curiosity that overrode the blaring problem; the obvious fictitious nature of the accounts. For years, his fascination had been able to dismiss his logic, wasting hours learning about creatures that healed miraculously and injured others fatally. Every characteristic he’d seen in this wound matched the description of a scratch from a lycanthrope; a wolf-beast that could take a human form in disguise.
Until now, he’d never seen such an injury in person, or even heard verifiable claims. Fuck, he’d only half believed they were real until this moment, and even now, he still wasn’t sure. How did someone get involved with those creatures? Where had this encounter taken place? Was the beast somewhere nearby? How did this man escape, and alive no less — did the storm help him get away?
Shane had a million questions, and half a mind to find a notebook and start jotting down accounts and sketching — in fact, he ached with longing to know more about such a forbidden topic, one he’d been ashamed to admit captured so much of his attention.
But Shane was terrible at giving himself what he wanted, and so he held his tongue.
“You are quiet. Should I be worried?” the man asked.
Not that he had any particular knack for reading people, but Shane could not read this man at all. His expression was impenetrable, in that any moment Shane thought he understood the tone — maybe he was in pain, or worried, or unimpressed — some other detail threw him off the scent. Or perhaps this was Shane’s fault, completely lost in wonder at the strange wound he’d only seen in illustrations on rotten old parchment, leaving no neurons left over to devote to the matter of tone.
As such, unprofessionally, he ignored the question. Instead, he reevaluated the gash with fascination, reaching his hand out to examine it. And he rationalized. This was not for his own curiosity; he did this to be thorough in his examination, to provide the best care, like he owed it to anyone seeking his help. The apothecary paused before his gloves met skin.
“May I…?”
Shane looked up to see the man give a slight nod. So close now, his features were handsome in an almost uncanny way; too sharp, the carve of his cheekbones too statuesque, his eyes too bright and too knowing in the dimly lit room.
“Is fine,” he replied. Shane tried again to read the man; his brows were lowered slightly, but one corner of his mouth crept up, the motion minuscule. Amusement, maybe?
It took effort to pry his eyes back to the wound. Shane began his inspection, palpating a few inches away from the edge of the wound, watching for guarding, and got no reaction until he pressed carefully at the blackened edge of one of the slashes. The response was less than he would’ve imagined; the wound looked terribly painful, yet he’d only seen the slightest flinch. Strangely, there was no warmth where Shane might’ve expected to feel it through his thin gloves.
“Tell me if this hurts,” Shane added, perhaps belatedly, but he was too enraptured by the wound to look up; when he didn’t hear any protest, he kept working.
The blackness blanched starkly when he applied pressure, blooming outward like water added to an inkblot and returning to border the wound when he lifted the pressure. He slowly formulated a plan. If the man could handle some pain, he’d knit the wound closed, apply a poultice of yarrow and comfrey he’d prepared recently. Then there was the matter of the wound’s — if Shane’s antiquated text was to be believed — supernatural origin, which demanded the use of wolfsbane. It was used to harm such creatures, when ingested, but a footnote on one of the pages mentioned it could be used to stanch the consequences of injuries they inflicted, if one acted quickly enough.
As the man took a deep breath, Shane realized with a start he’d abandoned his gentle touch in his apt curiosity. Working automatically, he’d been scanning with his fingertips for signs of anything under the skin; he was applying quite a bit of pressure, one hand on his flank and the other near his lower abdomen, and fingers pressing inward, then moving slightly, then pressing again. Shane meant to withdraw his hands, but he was pinned by his curiosity and continued the rhythmic motion, finally looking up to gauge if the man was in pain and too proud to say so.
Shane found the man’s narrowed eyes, newly conscious of their closeness. Hairs at the back of his neck stood to attention. He stuttered to a halt, held by an icy gaze that pierced down through him, that saw him in his entirety despite the scarce light, straight through to the marrow. Shane swallowed to find his mouth was dry.
“Sorry — I haven’t treated a wound like this before,” Shane said, then blanched, realizing how awfully unprofessional that was, and backtracked, “but I’ve studied it plenty, and I should have something for you. Would you be alright with me stitching it up? I won’t lie to you, it’ll hurt, but it should make the wound heal much faster.”
“Okay. No problem,” Shane caught the faint half-smile he’d noted earlier deepen, “I am good with pain.”
Shane should have retreated or sat back up in his stool. Somewhere far off, the sound dulled by the bellowing winds of the raging storm, his alarm bells were going off as they had for the knock at the door. Instead of going to collect the supplies he’d need, Shane looked down again at the strange wound, still hunched over, hovering above the man’s abdomen. He was missing something.
There was a wrongness to it. Shane narrowed his eyes at the black, sharp edge of eschar he knew was different from necrotic tissue, yet found himself struggling to admit it matched perfectly the description of a wound other apothecaries thought fictitious. Especially because — oh, that was it, the missing detail; according to his readings, this injury should have easily killed the man sitting and breathing in front of him. If his source was to be believed… a scratch from a lycanthrope dealt unruly damage, thinning the blood and hemorrhaging violently unless treated straightaway. Shane rolled that part of the text over in his mind.
Of course, that was all assuming the man was human. His stomach sank, like he was in free fall at a great height. A carriage careening off a cliff. Oh, fuck—
“You are bad at hiding your thoughts,” the man said, startling Shane nearly out of his stool. He flicked his eyes up, and when he met the man’s gaze, he aborted it, looking away immediately.
Shane went very, very still.
“…What?”
“You are quiet,” the man continued, voice deep and saccharine, like molasses, “but is written on your face. Gives you away.”
The man reached out his hand and held Shane’s chin, turning it to face squarely back at him. Shane’s panicked gaze danced back and forth between the man’s eyes, a frigid blue shooting through him. And his mouth — his smiling mouth, lips curled perfectly in amusement. Shane felt everything in his body lock up, aside from his heart, which thrashed violently against his chest. His mind ran miles and miles with every second that passed, but he was paralyzed. Flashes of yellowed parchment flickered in his mind as a supercut. Nightwalker.
“No reason for fear. I did not lie, I need your help,” he said this all very precisely, enunciating every syllable in that sonorous roll of his tongue.
This was good, the clarity, because otherwise Shane would not have heard it over the whitewater rush of blood in his ears. It did nothing to stem the hemorrhage of fear, however.
“And after I help you?” Shane found himself saying, “you will…?” he couldn’t finish the sentence.
The man seemed to consider this, humming in thought before he answered, “If you can fix this? I will pay you for service, and I will leave from door I came in.”
Then he dropped his hand from Shane’s chin and sat back upright in his stool. Shane looked back at him wide eyes, trembling as they scanned his face for any tell of a lie. Which, he realized, was futile, given the creature’s reputation for flawless deception. Shane’s mind continued racing, recalling in chunks a text he’d convinced himself was fiction but couldn’t help but read again and again in fascination.
Everything made sense, all the details he’d skimmed and dismissed as folktales; lycanthropes were known to be territorial, and the nightwalkers prideful. There must have been a fight, lost in the chaos preceding the storm, where he’d been struck. All the things that had confused him fit perfectly into this hypothesis — the unease, the injury, his build, his clothes, the stark uncanniness of his perfection —
Oh, fucking heaven above, he’d invited him inside, hadn’t he?
While Shane gathered his wits, the man waited patiently, studying him with a faint smile and a raised eyebrow, before he caught Shane’s gaze again. When Shane avoided meeting his eyes, he felt them rake over him in an excruciatingly slow once-over — one he could feel trailing over his skin, appraising him, ending up back at his mouth, waiting for it to move with Shane’s reply.
“You do not believe me?”
The words rolled off his tongue in a purr, rattling every animal instinct Shane had to run, hide, scratch, claw away. But he couldn’t move. Petrified, he opened his mouth, then closed it. Fucking obviously, I don’t believe you, he thought, hoping his incredulity wasn’t apparent on his face. I’m alone and isolated with a bloodthirsty creature. All I have is my stupid little knife. I’m fucked, I’m so, so fucked —
He was startled out of his fear by a soft chuckle.
“Okay,” the man mused, “You are scared. I will make simple for you,”
The man — creature? rose from his stool. Shane, like one of the deer on his foraging trips, looked up instinctually, eyes tracking the threat. He towered over Shane, and smiled good-naturedly. The juxtaposition made Shane’s stomach turn. The man spoke casually, no greater weight to it than a comment on the weather.
“I leave your shop with medicine, or you leave in pieces,” he shrugged, “is up to you, Hollander.”
Shane blinked. That was a threat; not an implied one, a real one, plain and simple. But there was no further for his fear to sink. He wasn’t sure if he’d taken a breath for the past several minutes. Since his realization, he was out of his body, and the thought occurred to him that he was incredibly sleep deprived and this entire situation could be another dream, another perversion his mind had conjured while he fell asleep reading fantasy. It made a lot more sense that way; he’d imagined this beautiful creature, a strange amalgamation of daydreams and old texts and novels he’d hidden near his bed, imagined those eyes boring down at him. Maybe that detachment, the outright denial of reality, is what got him moving again.
“Well, in that case,” Shane said as he removed his gloves, then got up, turned sharply about-face, and headed for a cabinet on the far end of the room, “take off your shirt.”
He heard the man snort a laugh behind him, followed by a rustling of cloth as he obeyed. Shane realized at this moment, for some reason, that he’d never gotten a name.
Okay. Fuck. He was doing this. There were really two scenarios, if Shane compartmentalized well enough: either he helped, and the man maybe killed him, or he didn’t help, and the man definitely ripped him to pieces in his own store. Shane would try his luck with the former, but truly, a part of his brain — the one that prepared inventory for his shop weeks ahead of time — was already planning to die tonight, trying to expedite the process of grief and acceptance as he worked. Because Shane was an efficient man.
With his mind elsewhere — wondering with startling apathy who would find his disfigured body in the morning — he set to collecting materials: a large bolt of cloth, sturdy thread and needle, an herbal honey preparation, the works. At the final drawer, he hesitated, hand hovering over a vial. Would this help or hurt the man? Shane had read it brought harm to creatures like him when consumed, but it healed that sort of wound on normal people; could it help applied topically, perhaps?
He stashed it in his pocket for now, lest he keep the man waiting. The only way Shane saw to get through this was to imagine he was any other customer, to cling to his routines and go through his procedures as he’d do for anyone else.
Steeling himself, he returned to where the man stood, his shirt abandoned on the stool, leaning back against the counter. As he approached, Shane hoped feebly the man didn’t catch his traitorous eyes, lingering on the column of his throat, the contour of his shoulders, the toned bulk of his arms. All served as reminders that this was anything but another customer. He stared right back at Shane. Waiting. Shane’s mind wandered elsewhere in a feeble attempt to protect him from fear.
Given his trade, Shane often found himself in the woods at odd hours. He’d gotten the hang of moving silently, not disturbing the wildlife; sometimes, if he was lucky, they’d unknowingly lead him to something interesting.
Mostly, he remained quiet simply to observe, or sketch if he’d come prepared. Knowing the woods without fearing them gave him special privileges, the ability to witness what most painters only wished they could capture. Great stags grazing on dew-dropped green, a perfectly static pond disturbed only by a swan pair, all the list of romantic and beautiful moments of nature Shane was fortunate to witness, and occasionally sketch amidst his notes.
Tonight did not remind him of any of these moments.
As he laid the cloth to cover the countertop, setting his materials in the tray he’d prepared earlier, Shane was instead struck by his memory from years ago, nearly forgotten. In the small hours, risen with the sun and a satchel slung on his shoulder for foraging, Shane spotted such a watchful creature as the one beside him. He’d been in the glen, and the eye-catching red-orange and powder-blue feathers stood out clearly against the cloudy sky. The bird on its perch was watching something Shane couldn’t spot, somewhere near him in the glen only visible at a height. It was perfectly still, picturesque, and stunning. How did that memory end?
“Lie down on the counter, I’ll close your wound,” Shane said, voice trembling on ‘wound’. The man started to do so, turning to the counter. Shane watched taut muscle move under the man’s skin before he stopped short with a brisk inhale.
Right. Shane remembered the end now. He’d watched with awe as the creature ruffled its wings, appreciating the magnificent display of hues. Then it dove, moving with incredible speed only yards away from him, a blur of furious color.
There, the kestrel plucked a foraging starling out of the green, its talons piercing through its neck, killing it instantly.
The creature was on him in a flash, unnaturally fast, giving Shane no time to process the blur before his head slammed against the wall from a shove at his chest.
Air ejected from his lungs, and his vision swam, fuzzing and swirling like a drunk’s, and almost coalesced into focus before it was sent reeling again as a huge forearm braced against his throat and threatened his windpipe. Shane didn’t struggle — not physically, anyway — he was fighting desperately for clarity of mind, trying to wrestle it back from the disorientation, trying to fucking see straight, think straight, something.
“Maybe you are better liar than I thought,” the man said, sardonic and rough, inches from Shane’s face by the sound; his vision whorled.
Shane tried to retort, confused, but only managed a rough wheeze. The creature’s free hand patted Shane’s pocket, where he’d stashed the vial of wolfsbane, then reached inside and held it up between them.
“Not bad idea. Probably would have worked, if you got me to swallow.”
Shane abandoned any attempt at sight, screwing his eyes shut and giving everything he had to understand what was going on. Unfortunately, as the clouds parted, he only realized more and more how completely and totally fucked he was. He hadn’t blinked once before the creature had pinned him at the throat — and the creature was tall and broad, sure, but Shane was by no means a small man, and his mind rattled with the thought that he’d been tossed around so effortlessly. That with the press of one arm, he was immobilized. Primal fear turned his stomach, pushing his heart into his throat, which had no space to accommodate the organ, given the pressure forced against it.
This wasn’t a creature he could evade or counter. Shane needed to do something, anything that would give him another second to live. He scrambled to think, to understand, trembling with fear and effort. The man was angry. The wolfsbane. He… thought Shane meant to kill him with it.
“Didn’t…lie” Shane croaked through the pressure on his throat, eyes tightly shut, and begged, “please.”
There was a pause, and Shane thought it was over. He braced for something, for pain, for his throat to give in to the pressure and collapse, for the lack of blood to his brain to finally reach the point of ischemia and end him right there in his own shop, without a fight.
The pressure against his windpipe eased slightly.
“Explain.”
Shane wheezed, air coming in only twice before sputtering as he choked the words through, words tumbling in panic.
“I thought — since the wound was from — ” Shane coughed, his throat burning, and realized he’d never technically confirmed if the wound had been from a lycanthrope, but he pressed on desperately, “oh fuck, I thought maybe it would get rid of the — I don’t know, poison, whatever that is — I’ve read about it, what it can do to… you. I wasn’t going to make you swallow it — I wasn’t going to make you swallow anything, there’d be no point, you aren’t infected, but it treats humans, so I thought for you, it might burn off the scar? Fuck, I don’t know —” he broke off with a painful cough.
Another pause. Shane was still wheezing. The suspense was going to kill him soon if the creature didn’t. He risked opening his eyes — he was too scared to look up, and instead stared down at the man’s fascinating wound, the blackened skin around it. At the contours of his abdomen, at the muscles defined like a marble statue, at the absurdity of his perfection. How had he mistaken him for human, even for a moment? For the first time, he noticed the chain the man wore, rich gold against his collar, catching the light, and almost laughed at the irony of the cross resting on his chest. It was all true. Shane had no intention to hurt this creature; how could he possibly think he stood a chance against this? Without a response, he forced himself to keep going.
“You can — please, you can watch everything I do, I won’t try anything,” Shane laughed incredulously, emitting a pitiful, wheezing sound, “I — I have a small knife, in my pocket, you can take it, I’ll help you, just — please, please, don’t…” Shane could not finish the sentence. This was all futile, wasn’t it? It was already over.
So he risked a look into the creature’s eyes.
There was no replacement of the pressure on his throat, but the threat lingered in a slight press. Shane remained breathless. To his surprise, his texts had gotten this part all wrong. With mere inches between them, Shane saw that the color of his eyes hadn’t eroded to scarlet, as some writers had described. The ice blue persisted, and at the edges a faint glimmer of red shone through, as if merely a reflection of distant fire. It was subtle enough that he might have missed it, had they not been inches apart. His focus on Shane was maddening, petrifying, brows lowered and mouth sneering in a contortion of anger. The veins and capillaries around his eyes were more prominent, blooming to dark telangiectasias fanning out past his lashes.
Terrifying and beautiful, red and blue, like the blood-stained kestrel.
What else had the texts gotten wrong? Shane scanned the creature’s face, finding the bow of his lips, wrought in a scowl. Were his teeth filed to razor points, as he’d read? Would he find out in a moment, when he inevitably unhinged his angular jaw and closed it around his flesh? Shane’s eyes pricked with tears, and he watched those lips crack into a crooked smile. His breath caught, unblinking as he traced the outline of a sharp canine with his eyes.
Shane thought, as he studied the creature’s face inches from his own, that it resembled reading poetry to someone on their deathbed; he’d been afforded the mercy of witnessing something very beautiful, before his death.
The memory of an annotation surfaced unconsciously, soothing his fear. A scrawled, frantic handwriting in one of the accounts, detailing that the pain of a nightwalker’s bite was remarkable; until replaced with incomparable ecstasy.
“Look at me,” the creature commanded.
Shane pried his eyes from the violent edge of ivory and obeyed. He finally released his braced forearm, and Shane trembled a sigh in relief, but he kept his eyes open, terrified at the consequence of disregarding the demand. The creature grabbed his chin like earlier, forcing his attention. Distantly, the scholar in Shane regretted not finding out more about this creature; the deviation in his appearance from his text had sent his mind reeling, wondering what else the texts had gotten wrong. What else had they missed? How absurd, to think about textual inaccuracies at a time like this…
“Give me the knife.”
Thoughtlessly, Shane obeyed, reaching into his pocket and handing it over with a trembling hand. The creature looked down at the small weapon, amused. He tapped Shane twice on the cheek, in a condescending ‘thank you’ that made Shane squirm, and turned the knife over in his hand before pocketing it.
Though he was no longer restricting his airflow, he remained in Shane’s space, which was suffocating him anyway. The creature wasn’t drastically taller than Shane, but the close proximity forced him to crane his neck to continue looking back at him — he’d never felt so small in his life. If he wasn’t sure he was going to die, Shane would be embarrassed beyond belief.
“Nothing more to say, zaichyk?”
The foreign word stirred something rotten in Shane, an awful concoction of fear and curiosity. Was this his way of asking for Shane’s last words? He had nothing to offer. In all his life, he had never had so little to say for himself. All he had were questions, and if he was going to die tonight anyway —
“What’s your name?”
The creature’s brow twitched into a furrow. When Shane didn’t back out, or try to run, or do much of anything but wait in wide-eyed silence, he chuckled, shaking his head.
“Shaking like leaf, and he asks my name. Brave, Hollander.”
To Shane’s surprise, the creature retreated, distancing them and rounding back to the counter.
“Come. You will try this, with the akonit. If it works, you will live.”
And if it doesn’t? Shane wondered, as he moved like a wraith, out of his body, back toward the supplies on the countertop. How long had he bought himself? Minutes?
The man set the vial back on Shane’s work tray before getting up on the counter in a fluid motion, leaning back on his hands while Shane prepared. He sat patiently, watching him work with an unreadable expression, his legs stretched out along the table and crossed at the ankle. Okay. So they were pretending this was normal. Pretending the man hadn’t just threatened his life; pretending the creature before him was a man at all. Shane could do that. It might make this doable if he acted like this was any other person. And if he were, that meant he’d missed a great deal of triaging questions.
“When— ” his voice cracked awfully, and he cleared his throat, “when did this happen?” Shane tried as he worked on the tray, threading a needle, cutting bandages. He was only half expecting a real answer.
“Four days,” the man shrugged, “your volkolak are different. Better with hiding,” he curled his lip in annoyance, not directed at Shane, “and so sensitive. Take everything personal.”
Oh. He was willing to share now, it seemed. Without his crowding presence, Shane could breathe again — he stole a glance and noted that the dark capillaries under his eyes had retreated slightly. Okay. This was normal. Everything was fine. Shane went through the rest of his usual questions, forcing a modicum of professionalism, but his body knew instinctually he remained in imminent danger. He asked another question, pushing through the tremor in his voice.
“Has this happened before? To you, or anyone else…er,” he gave the man a wary glance, “…like you?”
“No,” he said, then added, “not that I have seen.”
Okay. He’d asked a few questions, and he was still breathing. His pulse was still soaring, but Shane continued,
“Have you tried anything yet, to heal it?”
“Vodka. Feeding. Was not successful.”
It took the duration of one very long blink for Shane to move on from the use of the word feeding, and what he knew it implied. He moved on quickly.
“Does it hurt?”
That earned a single huff of laughter, “what does it look like?”
Shane looked up at him. If it was as painful as it looked, the man hid it impressively. His head was lolled to the side casually, and Shane traced the sharp curve of his jaw with his eyes before stuttering back down to his work.
“How… how do your wounds normally heal?”
“Completely,” he said, sounding frustrated as he looked down at the wound, “was bigger at first, but did not finish healing. Then this blackness,” he gestured with his hand, “and it is growing. Fucking mutts…”
So, Shane had guessed everything right so far. Assuming ‘volkolak’ were the same creatures Shane read about, it seemed injuries from other supernatural creatures didn’t heal flawlessly as they should have. He wanted to pry, to ask another litany of questions confirming what he’d read, testing what he’d baselessly suspected.
Some questions were not practical at all, and honestly had nothing to do with Shane’s work; what was his name? Where had he come from? Was he alone here in his… species? Did he really need to take lives to feed — did he enjoy it? If Shane wasn’t so terrified, he’d be inspired beyond measure — hell, if he was honest, he was curious despite the fear, curious with his life balancing on whatever whims consumed this impassive, impossible creature.
Looking down at his hands, Shane recognized that he was stalling, and soon the man on the table would realize, too. Even now, he could feel those keen eyes on him. He squeezed his eyes shut to take a deep breath, then picked up the vial, uncscrewing the top and taking a miniscule amount into the dropper. The man sat at attention, narrowing his eyes at the extract. Then at Shane, who took a trembling inhale to speak.
“I’m going to try this first. To see if it… well, to see if it does anything,” he held up the dropper, showing how little was inside the glass tip, “there’s only a few drops in here. Does it usually harm you, in this amount?”
The man pursed his lips, considering. “Probably, yes. Will not kill me, but it will hurt.”
Shane swallowed, “I’m hoping,” he explained, “that it’ll burn off whatever’s contaminating the wound.”
The man replied by leaning back, propped up by his elbows. He quirked his eyebrow, as if to say ‘get on with it,’ or maybe, ‘try whatever you want, I’ll gut you either way’. Shane couldn’t tell.
Regardless, there was no backing out of this now. He held the dropper in one hand and a swath of cloth in his other. He hovered over the man, looking down at him for once, yet remained terribly small before him. Shane hadn’t put his gloves back on. It was too late for that; despite the odd, pretend-normalcy they’d created, he was not eager to test the man’s patience. Shane placed the cloth over the largest of the gashes, fixing it so the open center of the wound was completely covered, but left one of the outer edges of blackened tissue exposed.
Now was usually when Shane would explain what he was doing, but he couldn’t find the words, and the man was already watching him with rapt attention, taking him apart with his eyes. Shane froze up again, too many scenarios flashing through his mind, nearly all of them ending with his blood on the walls.
As the storm raged, he was reminded how isolated they were. Fuck, no one might be here for days if the storm continued like this, no one to find his stupid body that allowed a monster into his stupid fucking shop. If he hadn’t invited him inside, maybe used some critical thinking, he wouldn't be in this mess… but he wouldn’t have known all those books were telling the truth about his existence, either. Fuck. Some good that knowledge would do him when he died. The panic built up, multiplying exponentially as every second that passed made his situation worse.
After too many seconds, the man sat up, leaning forward towards Shane, and raised his hand. Shane gave a real, full-body flinch away, his eyes squeezing shut, sucking in what he thought was surely, this time, his last breath. Instead, he felt cool fingertips against his skin, as they cupped his cheek, gentle and foreboding.
“Oh, you are scared again? But you were doing so well,” he chided. Shane risked opening his eyes and saw the pout he sported in mock sincerity.
Shane did not resist being pulled closer with the slightest suggestion of the motion against his cheek.
They were inches away again, but instead of fanning against his nose, there was the ghost of a breath at the flexure of his jaw. Outside, the wind howled, the blizzard thrashing against the windows. But the only sound Shane registered was low and silky.
“If you are scared to do this experiment,” he said, lips featherlight against Shane’s jaw, “there is something else we can try.”
Shane knew, of course, what he was implying. He knew how these creatures fed. It made the lips against his throat all the more paralyzing. There was no bite, as he’d feared, but a tantalizingly slow… oh, a kiss, he realized with a shudder, the brush of lips and a wet stripe of tongue against his skin.
“Normally does the trick,” he pressed another kiss to his neck, “but feeding has not helped me. Three bodies I drained on my travels here, and still I am wounded.”
Three bodies. This creature had killed three people in the past four days. He spoke of it like a mild inconvenience.
“Who knows,” he whispered into Shane’s ear, “…maybe you will be different.”
Shane let out a small, choked-out sound, a frightened animal’s whimper. And he wondered, despite the sickening twinge in his gut at the thought, how the fangs would feel when they broke his skin. He wondered with what skill the creature would perform the act.
Would he turn Shane’s head to the side with practiced precision, revealing his pulsing carotids, puncturing them to release violent gushes of vermillion, ending him in moments? Or would he find the jugular where it ran close to the skin, sink his teeth in slowly, let a steady trickle of deep wine-red course in rivulets down his collar? Deliriously, Shane thought that the latter was more likely. The man’s dark gaze, his careful tongue against his skin gave the impression he liked to savor the taste. Shane felt the man’s lips curl into a smile against his throat. When he pried his own eyes open, he saw a head of golden brown curls.
“Is this service you offer,” he let the tips of two razor-sharp teeth graze his skin, “apothecary?”
Somewhere, deep and buried, rolling six feet under like the dead, Shane registered the feeling this elicited in his body. Recognized the blinding heat that mixed irreversibly with terror, burrowing into his gut like a parasite, shortening his breath. Tried as he might to ignore it, he was not so oblivious to himself, to his disobedient gaze, to his wandering mind. He caught every letter of apothecary that landed against his neck, the hypnotic way the phonemes fell from his tongue.
Curious didn’t cover it anymore — curious was too innocent for the voracious appetite Shane was trying desperately to strangle. Curious covered wanting to know, not wanting to feel. The text flashed in his mind. Pain replaced with incomparable ecstasy. Between his back teeth, he gnawed on the inside of his cheek. This was a frustrating, unwanted contradiction of animal instinct, this unspeakable want. It was horrible, and wrong, and tempting. He was sick with it. Dizzy. With effort, he ripped his mind from the intoxicating sensation of practiced lips hovering over his skin, forced himself to seek reason, and self-preservation.
And, because he was verifiably excellent at not giving himself what he wanted, Shane took a shuddering breath and spoke.
“I— ” Shane cleared his throat to sound less on the verge of tears, “I think this might work,” he said, and because it seemed to help before, he added, “please.”
The man retreated, but not hastily, not before he took a deep inhale through his nose against Shane’s throat, taking in his scent and making him shiver. He leaned back on the counter, wearing a sardonic smile that read, ‘suit yourself’.
“Let us see then, Hollander,” he lifted his chin in a taunt, “if you deserve your good reputation.”
With a steadying breath, Shane reset himself, trying not to shake too obviously as he replaced the bandage over the open parts of the gash, so the wolfbane wouldn’t hit anywhere but the black scarring. The eyes on him were a tangible sensation, a true feeling against his skin — studying his hands with care. Finally ready, he raised the dropper, a few inches above the ink-black tissue, and with a trembling hand gave the faintest squeeze to the rubber top. Time stilled as he watched the extract fall to the wound.
The effect was instant. There was an audible hiss at the contact, and Shane was relieved to near tears when he watched the inky lesion melt away. The breath he was apparently holding left in a near sob. It was working. He was right. He might fucking live to tomorrow. He turned his head up to the man, looking for approval, and his heart dropped.
Shane reflexively thought of the forest again. Really, he could hear it, could feel the winter chill of the memory. He’d been much younger then, when he’d found blood in the snow. A faint trickle at first, one he’d followed like a candy trail in curiosity, that became horrific splatters as he walked. There in the snow, fur mottled gray and splotched currant where it should have been a playful bronze, was a whimpering fox, breathing almost as heavily as it bled. Sly, and fast, and predatory, and near-dead in the snow.
The man’s face contorted into a snarl, his brows knit tight, his teeth bared. He was staring daggers into the wound, watching the blackness ebb away. By some miracle, he did not lunge again for Shane’s throat; he fisted his hands to white knuckles in the cloth laid over the table, breathing forced, even breaths. Pain was a universal language. His attention, which had been focused on his wound, snapped up to Shane so violently it should have been audible. Shane realized he’d frozen up again and scrambled,
“It work— ”
“I can see it fucking worked,” he spat, the veins under his eyes pulsing darker. He didn’t reach out and snap Shane’s neck, which he took as a good sign.
“I’ll be done soon.”
The funny thing about predators, Shane learned that day in the woods, is that they had no idea what to do when they were wounded.
Prey knew when to separate themselves from their kin to spare them from being tracked by the scent of their blood, knew when to find somewhere quiet and beautiful to die. Predators did not know pain. They did not understand how to be injured. He watched now as the man swallowed the pain, forcing it down his own throat in silence, his breaths tight and measured.
Between drops, Shane studied him. Watched a bead of sweat fall from his brow and roll down his temple, his cheek, to his jaw to fall on his chest. How awful it must sting to be the poison for which Shane was applying an antidote. He took care not to get it anywhere but the black eschar, observing in awe at the mere few drops of wolfsbane it took to debride the malevolent tissue.
When the last of the blackness had been consumed, Shane removed the bandages, wiped away excess, and watched, lips parted in amazement as the wounds stitched themselves closed. It wasn’t elegant or clean, but it was breathtaking, as if one of his texts had become animated before his eyes.
Months of healing, done in mere seconds. Sheaths of white, papery fascia knit together first, individual nidi budding into crests, then coalescing with each other in a cascade. Fibrils of muscle weaved around each other over top, and finally pink skin bloomed over what had been four violent gashes moments ago.
“Incredible…” Shane muttered. Then he did something very, very stupid; he made the same mistake twice.
Forgetting himself, enchanted by the miracle of healing he’d witnessed, Shane reached his ungloved hand down to feel the raised, pink hypertrophic scar left in place of the gash. To confirm it was real, maybe, or that this wasn’t an illusion. He had about a million new questions. Just as he’d reached out, innocent and curious, to pet the trembling fox in the woods. And because predators did not know how to be injured, the fox snapped its teeth at him.
The man caught his wrist with a crushing grip, such that any further pressure would surely grind his carpal bones to dust. He gasped, shocked out of his spell by the pain, but couldn’t even blame the man. What the fuck was Shane doing, just now?
“Now you want to touch?” the man leered at him. Shane looked up, all the fear he’d foolishly forgotten in wonder rampaging back at once, “and I thought you were scared.”
“No, I — ” pain shot through his hand up to the elbow, and he whimpered. This was all wrong.
“No, what? I am mistaken?” The man stared daggers into him, his smirk flashing a fang, and Shane could see nothing else.
This was different than earlier. He wasn’t angry or threatened, but the darkness in his eyes made Shane’s stomach flip. He was sitting up now, and expecting an answer. Shane scrambled for one and came up, unsurprisingly, empty, apart from a stifled sound of pain.
“How unprofessional,” he chided, “and you do not even know my name.”
The creature leaned in further, yanking Shane closer by his crushing grip on his hand. Fuck if he didn't know what he was doing, to keep putting those teeth near his neck — he all but purred into Shane’s ear,
“Ilya Rozanov,” he said, the syllables rolling elegantly off his tongue, “is polite to ask permission before putting hands on me.”
Shane’s breath hitched, too obvious in their close proximity. He swallowed hard and pressed his eyes closed again, hopelessly wishing he would disappear into nothing. They shot back open with words against his skin,
“Well? I am waiting,” he — Rozanov said, pulling back and looking Shane in the eyes.
The creature was not angry; he was playing with his food. This was torture. Doubly so because it tempted Shane to acknowledge that if he laid himself bare, despite the paradoxical white-hot fear coursing through him, that he still wanted more of this. To discover more, to feel more. The idea of knowing something so secret, so elusive, enticed him like a siren song — quite literally, as it would surely kill him to be caught in such a trap. And Rozanov, in teasing remarks and impending proximity, was goading him, challenging him to admit all of this. To give in. But Shane was disciplined, devoted to his trade, so he did not give himself what he wanted.
Unless, of course, what he wanted happened to coincide with what he ought to do for a patron. Such as completing a thorough examination to ensure he’d properly cared for an ailment. Yes, that was a suitable loophole.
“May I,” Shane said, voice wavering, but meeting his gaze, “examine your scar, Mr. Rozanov?”
Shane watched as Rozanov’s expression, impossibly, darkened further at his compliance in the stipulation of using his name. The apothecary was dedicated to excellence in his work, and liked to prove himself — but he was not prideful, never arrogant. Especially not when he stood the chance to learn something new.
“That’s better,” Rozanov said, and relinquished his crushing force on Shane’s poor hand. He let Shane stretch out the fingers, relief that they still obeyed his command, before taking his hand again. Rozanov pressed Shane’s fingers up against the pink, raw skin that mere minutes ago had been a horrific open wound.
The man’s skin was cool under his fingertips — not hot and feverish, or moist and clammy, but cool, like the underside of stone. However, the threads of scar tissue were warmer, pulsating; Shane discerned that it might be healing under his palm. Unbelievable. It almost made him forget he was going to die. He couldn't help a quiet ‘oh!’ in surprise as he leaned in closer, thoughtlessly pressing more of his hand against the healing tissue. How had this miracle existed without Shane knowing about it? Rather, how could he have dared deny the existence of something so mesmerizing?
“Is this how you always perform your examinations, Hollander?”
Shane blinked down at him. It was quite a scene; Shane was leaning most of his body over Rozanov’s, pressing a flat palm to his lower abdomen. His fingers were moving unconsciously, tracing over the healing skin, his lips parted in awe, in reverence.
He did actually examine something — there was a remaining inky blackness, where Shane hadn’t applied the wolfsbane — it peeked out, disappearing behind the waistband of his trousers. It wasn’t much; he saw the taper and imagined only the tail end of the gash remained, a few inches at most. With the barest brush of his fingertips, he traced the new, healed skin down, moving towards Rozanov’s hip, until he reached the remainder of the untreated wound. The texture was coarse under his fingertips and cold. Rozanov tensed slightly at the touch. Shane finally answered his question.
“No,” Shane started, “but I always finish the job.”
Shane let his fingers press into the wound, at the exact junction where it met his trousers. He didn’t look up to watch the smirk creep onto Rozanov’s face, but he could hear it in his voice.
“Is that right?”
The wind had not relented, the storm had not ceased rampaging against the walls, but Shane could hear none of it.
“May I finish treating your wound, Mr. Rozanov?” he said, aiming for a modicum of professionalism in these extenuating circumstances.
Shane wasn’t sure what was wrong with the wording, but for some reason, Rozanov’s grin was predatory in response.
“Go ahead,” he replied.
Shane intended to stare down at the wound and avoid his eyes. This was a mistake, because when Rozanov reached down to unbutton his trousers, he felt his mouth go dry, watching every tendon flex beneath the skin in his decidedly huge hands. He pulled them down just enough to reveal the end of the gash, and Shane was no longer examining the wound.
Instead, he followed the deep lines in his torso that started on either flank, up at his iliac crests, dimpling slightly at the anterior spines. They coaxed his eyes salaciously inward, downward, until Shane’s face burned at where his gaze had settled. His cloak was suddenly unbearably warm, suffocating. He needed to move, to retrieve the dropper again, but the adjustment in the cloth brought Shane’s attention to the distinct, unmistakable impression of something else on the man's body that needed attention. Fuck —
“Something wrong, Hollander?”
A second of hesitation preceded Shane turning to grab the wolfsbane.
“Not at all.”
Shane prepared the cloth, his mind racing. The treatment earlier had been unmistakably painful for Rozanov — in fact, it was the only reaction Shane had understood on the man’s face since he’d entered the shop. He’d seen his jaw flex, his brows knit together, heard the strain of a curse fall from his lips; applying the wolfsbane hurt. So Shane couldn’t at all comprehend his… paradoxical reaction. His obscenely large reaction.
Except he could understand it perfectly, a traitorous voice pried. Except that he’d been fixated on that exact concept, that very contradiction, since Rozanov’s fangs had caught the lantern light. Pain replaced with incomparable ecstasy…
Shane shook his head minutely, refocusing — right, the last of the wound needed treatment. He removed the bottle from the stopper and felt the urge to ask permission, lest his hand be seized again; but when he looked up at his face, Rozanov was already watching his expression, and nodded assent. He put his arms behind him on the table to prop himself up and leaned back to give Shane room to work, inadvertently displaying his body, which Shane pointedly ignored in a fruitless attempt to maintain his sanity.
Shane raised the dropper, using the bandage to cover the unaffected skin and prevent any unnecessary damage, and let a few milliliters fall to the corroded black skin. He watched as Rozanov stifled a grunt of pain, his mouth pressed into a tight line that, barely, almost imperceptibly, curled up at the ends.
The hiss of the toxins fighting each other sounded as it had earlier. Skin sizzled before it healed, no less mesmerizing the second time around. Yet while Shane waited to see if the dose had been sufficient, his eyes wandered again. It wasn’t his fault, damn it, this body led his eyes that way, careening down the path his ridiculous, chiseled body towards —
“You are staring.”
If it wasn’t already, Shane’s face flushed to the tips of his ears. He cleared his throat in a pitiful attempt to cover his gasp.
“I — I’ve never seen anything like this before,” he really hoped it was clear he meant the injury, and not the very, very obvious strain in the man’s trousers, “I wanted to— ”
“Ah,” the man frowned, too casually for the renewed jackrabbiting in Shane’s chest, “this is problem.”
“… Problem?”
“You have seen me, hm?” Shane blinked rapidly, parsing for the meaning. There was no sign of the pain from earlier in his voice; he was a picture of health. Of confidence. Of power.
“And tomorrow,” Rozanov continued, “will be torches, searching for these night-demons, whatever name they give me here. This is problem for me.”
“No!” Shane said, then winced at his own volume as Rozanov lifted an eyebrow.
“No?”
“No,” he repeated, quieter, “please, no need for that — I won't say anything, to anyone. You have my word.”
Rozanov tutted and shook his head, like he’d found a child snatching food from a cart and was mildly disappointed. Except the child was Shane, and instead of a stern talking-to or a snap on his knuckles, this creature was going to rip him to shreds in his own shop. Despite his racing pulse, exhaustion poured over him alongside fear; Shane wasn’t sure how many more times he could stand this, going back and forth between a false sense of security and certainty of his imminent death.
“Why should I take your word, Hollander?” Rozanov asked.
“I’ve never broken it. And you said — before, you said if I’d help you, you’d — ”
This earned him an honest, full-bodied laugh. It should have been terrifying, or sinister; instead, it was frightening in how disarming it was. Shane took the opportunity to distance them — not running, like maybe he should have, but taking a few steps back. Running would be stupid, useless against the speed he’d demonstrated earlier, but at least it would’ve made sense. Running would be the natural reaction.
Rozanov countered by sitting up and swinging his legs over the side of the table, and hopping down to a stand. He didn’t put his shirt back on or button his trousers; Shane could see the wound knitting itself together at his hip. Rozanov took a lazy step toward him, and Shane shuffled backward.
“I am impressed you manage this shop. Skilled in your practice, yes, but you are no businessman. You gave me what I needed from you too easily.”
With a short few steps, Shane gasped at his back hitting the wall. The storm reached a crescendo, with a startling crash sounding in the distance, maybe a tree collapsing, somewhere in the violent tempest.
“Please,” Shane tried again, as Rozanov boxed him in, placing his huge arms on either side of Shane’s head against the wall, “I — I won’t say a word of this. No one will know you were here.”
“You will know,” he said, leaning in until their noses brushed against each other. The levity in his expression reduced, darkening to solemnity, his voice lowered to a whisper.
“You will remember me, won’t you, zaichyk?”
That word again, whatever it meant, crept down his spine as a shiver. There was nowhere to look but Rozanov’s eyes. His pupils were blown wide, unnaturally so, mydriasis that far exceeded a fatal dose of nightshade. Black consumed the blue iris to a mere ring; the red glimmer persisted.
Shane did not know how to answer.‘Yes’ was condemning, but ‘no’ …well, Shane had always been an awful liar. How could he forget this, a creature of fiction he’d obsessed over in silent infatuation, now standing before him, more beautiful than his text could hope to capture? Could the creature hear his heartbeat thundering, blood running cold to rival the storm?
“Will you bite me?” Shane whispered, and realized his error instantly. He was asking for Rozanov’s intention, but the wording could easily be interpreted as a request.
Rozanov’s dark, serious expression cracked into a smirk, exposing a fang.
“Is what you want?”
“I…”
Shane closed his eyes, forcing himself to imagine his own blood on the walls, his breath leaving him in pained gasps, the piercing of his flesh, the sting of air hitting a fresh wound. He’d seen life leave people's eyes before; when they came to him too late, when he was powerless to help them. He’d seen pain before; heard the wailing agony of it, the weak wheezing breath, smelled sweat and desperation. Shane had been a witness to death and pain innumerable times and was no stranger to either. But this was a familiarity of observation, always leaving him a mere bystander.
With horror, Shane confronted the fact that none of that deterred him. Not fractionally as much as it should have.
The creature grabbed Shane’s chin, tapping his cheek with his thumb. His eyes fluttered open.
“This pretty face. So honest. It betrays you, Hollander.”
Shane didn’t have the presence of mind to register the comment. Rozanov’s thumb brushed over his bottom lip; prodded at it, the barest suggestion, and his lips parted. It was innate, instinctual. The finger slipped past his lips, running over his teeth, inspecting them with the pad of his finger. He paid special attention to his unremarkable canines, pressing up into them, and Shane’s head tilted up with the motion. His brows knit together, but he did not resist. Like a butterfly pinned by an entomologist, rendered immobile for observation. Rozanov’s jaw flexed, lips pursed as he studied him.
When he pushed his thumb in further, Shane felt the pressure of it on his tongue, and a sharp tug in his gut. Neither of them spoke. Shane didn’t think he could, even if he wanted to. Rozanov watched him in rapt attention, his eyes flicking down to his spit-slick finger and Shane’s eyes, half lidded, surely unfocused by now with how hazy the room looked. When Shane swallowed, he watched Rozanov’s eyes track the motion in his throat. The scrutiny baffled him — what could possibly be interesting about a simple human in the presence of such a remarkable creature? Why did it make him feel like the floor would swallow him any second, like he could barely stand upright?
He removed his finger, letting the saliva smear on his mouth. Shane spoke through glossy lips, in a breathless whisper.
“What’re you doing to me?”
Rozanov raised an eyebrow, almost innocently. “What do you mean?”
“This is…” he shook his head slightly, at a loss, “wrong. Very wrong. So why…”
“Why do you want it?” Rozanov finished his question for him, holding his face now with a large palm, squishing it a little with his thumb. “Only you can answer this, I’m afraid.”
“I don’t want to die,” Shane felt the need to clarify. That much, at least, he knew — it was what made the rest of this so baffling.
“Then you are in luck,” Rozanov said, “I don’t want to kill you.”
Somewhere in Shane’s mind, what pathetic scraps of survival instincts remained — apparently, they had taken the night off — relaxed, slightly. But the confusion was louder. The confusion roared compensatorily, so Shane didn’t have to acknowledge how obvious this was. So he could helplessly deny where his blood was rushing, because this was wrong, so wrong, so bad and sinful and rotten, and what did it say about him, to have such heat rising in his body when faced with such a creature?
He was a man, for one thing. That wasn’t shocking as much as it was confirmatory, a theory he’d had about himself, discovered in novels he’d read alone in shame, smothered in silent denial. He’d put that in a little box and buried it, or at least tried to. That he could maybe, eventually, make his peace with; privately, lest he be strung up for letting the words land anywhere but his head. Even then, letting this leave the safety of his own mind… acting on it was inexcusable, unthinkable. And this other facet? The one with bloodthirst and fangs and immortality — he couldn’t acknowledge it, he outright refused to, he couldn’t. But the traitor inside him, the one who stole darkened glances and lingered with his hands, cast a net out. He waited, seeking.
“You don’t? Then what…?”
Rozanov huffed a laugh, and his smirk deepened.
“Stupid little thing, for one so smart. You think I can’t see where your eyes go, zaichyk?”
“I — I was only…”
Shane looked up with big eyes, worrying his bottom lip with his teeth.
“Only what? Use your words.”
There was no use in doubling down on his denial. It was helpless, pretending at this point that he was dizzy in fear, and not in a necrotic, consuming lust. Pretending that he was at a loss for words out of terror, and not in sheer effort of refusing to entertain the lurid capabilities of his imagination. But even now, when a simple look down between them would make it obvious what he wanted, Shane could not give in. He couldn’t make that final, decisive move himself. A bodily reaction had plausible deniability, but what forgiveness could be afforded if he admitted this aloud?
He needed it to be Rozanov’s fault, so that when he was bleeding and debauched and likely satisfied with it, Shane did not have himself to blame.
“I’ve only ever read about… things like this,” he explained.
Rozanov hummed in amusement at the response, and Shane cleared his throat as, again, he recognized the double entendre a bit too late.
But he did not correct it. He waited.
“It’s different to see it myself,” he added. Seeking.
“Oh? And how does ‘it’ compare with your books?”
Shane opened his mouth to speak, but he couldn’t make a sound. His eyes were stuck on the brief flash of fang revealed when he spoke. Rozanov took one of Shane’s hands, which had been hanging uselessly at his sides, and lifted it towards his face.
“You want closer look?” he asked, and opened his mouth.
Shane inhaled sharply as Rozanov grabbed his hand and guided it to his fangs.
He was sure he wasn’t breathing, that he hadn’t in minutes, that he’d long since gone blue and hypoxic and knocked out on the ground and imagined all of this. It didn’t matter. A hairline fracture formed inside him, and he could pinpoint the exact location if he focused. It started at the manubrium, already careening down the body of his sternum as he began his examination.
This was over the line of justifiable; he worked like he might for a customer complaining of caries, only without a measure of decorum. Shane traced over the curved shape of the canine, then pressed his thumb up into the keen ivory, only slightly, pulling back with a sharp intake of breath at how easily it threatened to break his skin.
How would he react, Shane wondered, with a drop of blood on his tongue? Would he lash out, succumb to animal violence as he had earlier when he was threatened?
Shane found something with his finger, a soft spot in the palate behind his fangs, and pressed on it experimentally. Rozanov watched him with half-lidded eyes, offering no objection, as he poured into his subject of observation. Mindlessly, he’d lifted his other hand to hold Rozanov’s jaw, inspecting him shamelessly, looking for a second row of sharpened incisors or ducts that might emit venom or anything else he could imagine was contained in the maw of this creature.
Only hands gripping his waist sobered him, grounding him back to reality, his precarious position between the wall of his own shop and this night beast. Shane withdrew his hands, one slick with spit, a string of it clinging to Rozanov’s lips before breaking.
“Satisfied?”
Maybe there was venom, or poison, or fucking mind control — there had to be something he’d missed. That was the only thing that could explain the near-syncope state Shane fought to stand, the ache that wracked his body, pulsating and growing. An insidious onset of malignancy, chewing him up from the inside.
The fracture in his chest cleared down to the xiphoid, stretching the expanse of his sternum. The slightest push would collapse his ribs, crushing the pink of his lungs; the slightest pull would bare his open chest to reveal an unguarded, thrashing heart. Fuck. Something was very, very wrong with him. Because no, he was not satisfied.
Almost imperceptibly, Shane shook his head ‘no’.
His breaths labored as if he’d been sprinting. Shane waited for another salacious remark, another tease, but none came. The creature muttered, unmistakably a swear, the foreign syllables crashing between his teeth and tongue; Shane would know, because he hadn’t stopped staring at the man’s mouth and the weapons it held.
Rozanov’s brows were drawn down, his upper lip curled in a snarl, and Shane only got a glimpse at the voracious hunger in his eyes before his head was knocked back into the wall.
The fracture in Shane’s chest shifted, bone shifting against bone, a chalkboard-screech grind.
Shane nearly didn’t recognize the furious movement as a kiss, and it made him wonder if he’d ever been kissed before. He’d felt lips against his own, but never anything like this. Nothing that made his hair stand on end, that made his chest heave and mind swim, and forced his eyes shut to keep the room from spinning.
His startle response, again, was to still; he tensed every muscle, his chest far too tight for his heart or lungs. But he wasn’t scared of the kiss, of the effortless, practiced way Rozanov slotted their mouths together — he was scared of how fucking perfect it was. Scared of how much better it was than he’d imagined. His breath stuttered in the creature’s mouth, and he tasted bitter tobacco in the air he was gasping for. Shane wanted this, and he was losing his grip on pretending he couldn’t have it, losing ground he’d barely started with.
Every microsecond that passed, his mind was pleading, begging him to stop this madness, to convince him that he could still come back from this — he could still be absolved, if he cut this off now, if he fought it, if he claimed the creature had stolen this intimacy instead of accepting it from his outstretched hand. This voice grew distant, blending in with the swirling storm winds, fading into obscurity.
Their lips were wet, and Shane’s mouth opened too easily to let his tongue inside.
Shane registered points of contact, each of ten fingertips digging into his waist, grounding him until they lifted. Within seconds, those big hands roamed up Shane’s torso, one hand cupping his face, holding his jaw in place while the other unfastened his cloak, letting it fall to their feet. A hum sounded from Rozanov’s throat, deep and content. When his long fingers traced backwards, threading through his hair, the rest of Shane’s resolve teetered precariously off the edge, resisting feebly the urge to melt into the creature's hands.
A fang grazed Shane’s bottom lip, reminding him who and what had him panting. His shoulders started to slump, his head falling forward into the kiss, that was it. It was over. He hadn’t fully admitted it to himself yet, not mentally, but his body had finally given up this useless charade.
An unfiltered, raw sound ripped out from Shane’s throat — like forcing a joint back into the socket, a nagging ache sharpened to pain, then soothed by profound relief, by a rightness. He returned the fervor, allowing himself to chase it, to follow the rhythm of the mouth against his, heart racing with desire. It was clumsy and unpracticed, but he didn't care; neither, it seemed, did Rozanov.
The fingers in Shane’s hair dug in close to his scalp, curled, and pulled back hard, meeting no resistance. Shane was free-falling and accepted any guidance offered. Deft fingers worked at the buttons of Shane’s shirt, reminding him of the other man’s bare torso, of the taut muscle he’d been eyeing. He raised his hands up for a moment to explore the feeling of his skin under his fingertips, then recalled in a daze being instructed to ask permission before touching. Shane braced with a gasp of air in a brief moment when their mouths were disconnected.
“Can I…?”
Rozanov answered his unasked question, using his free hand to grab one of Shane’s and press it to his chest. Shane hardly got a breath in before the gap between their lips closed again.
Shane did not object, and carefully placed both hands on Rozanov’s chest. Not to push him away, but to feel with a curious wandering of his fingertips gliding down his torso. He’d meant it, earlier, even if he’d misspoken; this was new to Shane. New in practice, at least. New outside of novels he took care to hide, carefully concealed until an unnamed ache overtook him and he’d pore over the pages in shame and satisfaction in bedside lamplight. This was real, now, and the storm had locked him in with it. At his tentative touch, Rozanov hummed, another low, satisfied sound as he kissed hungrily at Shane’s jaw, following the curve of his mandible up to the joint.
“That’s it,” Rozanov cooed in his ear, “better to be honest, ah?”
It was. Shane was panting, trying to catch up on oxygen, his lips red and wet and swollen. In his chest, the muscles of his heart worked ragged, the fibers screaming in dissent at the absurd tachycardia they struggled to maintain. Rozanov’s hand wrapped around his beating heart, the apex in his palm, his fingers pressing into the raging ventricles, and squeezed, confounding the rhythm entirely.
Shane came to an understanding, a weed he’d pulled for years finally springing up from the surface in insistence of itself. The words encouraged him, unfettering his curiosity until he couldn’t still his hands, palming every curve and valley of Rozanov’s torso, trailing down toward his hips, his lower abdomen, to the trail of hair shades darker than the curls on his head.
His hands slowed as he reached the waistband of Rozanov’s unbuttoned trousers, hanging low on his hips. A chill brushed his newly exposed chest as the storm seeped through the walls, but Shane’s blood was boiling far too hot to notice. Rozanov kissed down his throat, letting his fangs graze, but never breaking skin. Shane anticipated those huge hands on his body, and was startled by a sharp, pained inhale at his collarbone.
Rozanov swore in his native tongue, pulling back to look Shane in the eye. He had a small, irritated laceration on his upper lip, and Shane watched the burning wound heal itself, more lethargically than the reaction had been on his torso.
“Your necklace,” Rozanov said, lip twitching minutely in a wince, “silver?”
Silver? Shane blinked a few times, putting it together.“Oh! Fuck, I’m sorry — ” his hands drew up behind his neck.
Rozanov watched with rapt attention as he undid the clasp and held the chain in his hand, the small snake pendant catching the light. It’d been in his family for a few generations; the serpent for Hygeia, matching the sign over the door to the shop. Shane motioned to hand it over, like he’d offered to disarm himself of his little knife earlier, then faltered as he recognzied the absurdity of it. Fuck, why was he —
“So eager to be defenseless?”
Rozanov teased, but there was no lightness to it; it sounded like an accusation. In his hand was proof of how there’d been an opportunity to reject this, to resist and fight such objective defilement, and he was about to hand it over without even being asked. The creature tutted at him, watching Shane’s face heat in shame. Rozanov’s tongue darted out to wet his lips, lingering momentarily on the slowly healing wound the silver had branded him with, and Shane followed with his eyes.
That footnote turned over in his mind again. Pain replaced with incomparable ecstasy…
“Keep it,” Rozanov instructed. Shane furrowed his brow.
“Who are you fooling, zaichyk? Hm? We both know you will not use it.”
The words landed on Shane’s ears as a fatal diagnosis. He tried to turn his face away, but Rozanov tilted his head to follow him, forcing himself to take up Shane’s entire field of view. His smirk was manic, his eyes wide with hunger.
“You would not think to, even if I sank my teeth in,” he continued.
Shane shivered, tried to shake his head no, but the movement was stilted and small. His hand closed tight around the necklace, white-knuckled, the tail of the snake digging into his palm.
“You would not push me away, if I fed from you.”
Shane’s breath punched out of him like he’d been struck. This creature, since he’d been invited through the door, had dissected Shane to pieces, creating a manifest of the darkest parts of himself.
“And if I drained you, took you until your pulse faded, you would use your last words to thank me.”
It was sinister, predatory, and the most seen Shane had ever felt in his life. A thrill pulsed through him, wild and wanting, coiled so tight it threatened to rip him apart when it should burst. He couldn’t conjure a single thing to say that wouldn’t condemn him further. Rozanov caressed his cheek with the back of his hand, and his head lolled to the side, following the touch.
“Look, how you offer yourself for me, here.”
He pushed back the collar of Shane’s unbuttoned shirt on one side, and with a featherlight touch, followed the line of his clavicle out to the joint of his shoulder. There he found a purple bruise, starting to yellow around the edges, from the straps of his bag when Shane carried firewood home from the woods a few days ago.
Rozanov brushed over it, then, watching his face, pressed his thumb into the sensitive skin.
Shane winced, sucking in a sharp breath through his teeth, hyperaware of how it lit the rest of him on fire. It was an intentional, deep press; the pain spun in his chest, coiling him tighter. An unreadable look crossed Rozanov’s face, like he was cataloguing Shane’s reaction; his brows knit together, his eyes wide and questioning. Shane lost track of the other hand until it slid down his torso, leaving goosebumps to rise in the wake of his fingertips.
“And here…” Rozanov continued, palming at the strained front of Shane’s trousers.
The pressure was electric. Shane groaned, instinctually canting his hips forward into the touch. Rozanov held still, making him writhe into it as he watched. Shane did the same, looked down between them, at the thick forearm that’d nearly crushed his windpipe earlier, at the heel of his palm where it obliged his wordless request for more. Rozanov pushed off the other shoulder of Shane's shirt, and he shrugged out of it, letting it fall to the ground with his cloak. His breathing was labored, his jaw clenched tight to choke down another sound as he eyed the outline of Rozanov’s hard cock through his unbuttoned trousers.
He wanted to… fuck, he wanted. What was the point in hiding it if Rozanov saw right through him anyway? The coil snapped, the shrapnel of it stinging in his chest, the words ripped out of him by force.
“Bite me.”
Shane’s voice was hoarse from disuse, from where Rozanov had pressed his forearm against it; yet it was the clearest, most sure thing he’d said all evening. For the first time, he felt Rozanov stutter in his movements.
“You do not know what you’re asking for,” Rozanov drawled.
They were both watching where their bodies connected, the movement of his hand and the rocking of Shane’s hips against it. It wasn’t a smooth roll, the motion foreign and frankly, if Shane had half a mind to process it, pathetically desperate on his part. There was a faint damp mark where Rozanov had pressed the heel of his palm into the leaking head of Shane’s cock. It was so much more than he’d imagined, yet not nearly enough.
“Yes, I do,” he insisted, frustration audible.
Rozanov’s jaw flexed. “Do you deserve it?”
If Shane wasn’t scarlet in the face, he would’ve paled.
“Deserve —? I thought you wanted —”
“Ah, but you are dying for it.”
He punctuated this with a rough grind of his palm, and any fight Shane had left in him left in a grunt.
“You run business, should know supply and demand. You keep looking at my mouth, hoping I am hungry for you. So, I will ask again. Do you deserve it?”
Disgust ripped through Shane — purely at himself, how this ugly, perverse need consumed him. At how much he wanted this, what he was willing to do for it. Usually, he could pride himself on his initiative, his drive to find solutions to problems, remedies to heal, tonics to soothe. Now he used it to find an answer to this question posed to humiliate him.
Beyond that frustration, Shane wanted to defy expectations, like when people viewed him as a final resort, having no faith in his work. Rozanov was waiting for the moment he would give up and run, and Shane would not run because he liked to be exceptional at everything he did, liked to be the best. That, and an overwhelming urgency he didn’t know what to do with; this foreign, animal need to chase pleasure. With effort, Shane recalled something from a novel, a description he’d found fascinating, one his mind would wander to when he was alone.
He locked eyes with Rozanov, finding hunger there as he swallowed his pride and sank to his knees. Rozanov whispered under his breath, the words clipped and foreign, a prideful smirk rising into his features. Unhurried, Rozanov shoved his pants down past his hips, and before he could hesitate, Shane lifted his hands to the waistband of his boxers and tugged them down to follow.
Shane’s idea suddenly became a lot less realistic. The fog of lust parted for a moment of panic — what the fuck had he gotten himself into? He was eye level with a frankly intimidating length. Not that stopped his mouth from watering at the sight of him, at the dark hair that led his eyes down, then followed the length of him back up towards his navel, flushed red at the tip. Rozanov stepped out of the fabric, then carded a hand through Shane’s hair, and thoughts emptied from his racing mind as he melted into it, tilting his head back.
Shane darted his tongue out to wet his lips and steeled himself; he always finished things he started, and this would be no exception. He leaned forward, flattened his tongue, and licked a slow stripe up the length of him, rewarded by the slightest twitch of the long fingers tangled in his hair. The skin was smooth and silken, a touch of saltiness to the taste.
“So eager,” Rozanov muttered.
Encouraged, Shane swallowed hard, closed his eyes, and wrapped his mouth around the head of his cock. He wasn’t sure of the logistics; what little he’d read about this was doused heavily with flowery language and metaphors. But he imagined how it might feel on himself, what he’d clumsily attempted with his hands in the dark. He pulled his head back slightly, then forward, taking more into his mouth, stopping only when the tip got close to the back of his throat.
“Da, that’s it.”
All Shane could manage was a stifled whine in reply. If it wasn’t before, now his head was wading through something viscous. Dark and opaque and syrupy, his thoughts metabolized into their simplest constituents. He should've been embarrassed, probably, or ashamed, definitely. But all the blood his brain needed to think had gone uselessly south.
Fuck. Shane liked the weight of it on his tongue. Liked how he smelled, the heady musk of him when he took more in his mouth, and got close to the dark hair at his pelvis. He pulled back and repeated, dragging his tongue on the underside, guessing at what would feel good. Rozanov didn’t let him guess for long; his hand started to guide Shane’s head to set a rhythm, and he heard a groan above him. The sound rattled around Shane’s head at the thought that he’d elicited it from the creature’s lips.
Then the guiding hand pulled him off, leaving Shane only a second to catch his breath before Rozanov’s knee nudged him in the chest, prompting him to move backward. The back of Shane’s head hit the wall with a soft thud. He looked up at Rozanov with big eyes, knit brows, and glossy lips, unsure if he should continue.
Rozanov smacked his cheek — not very hard, but enough force to turn his head. He tapped over the spot again.
“Open.”
Thoughtless, Shane obeyed. Rozanov’s fang flashed him through a crooked grin as he took himself in hand and tapped the head of his spit-slick cock on Shane’s lips. It was humiliating. Demeaning. Condescending. Shane had never been this hard in his life.
Shane gasped a sharp inhale through his nose as his mouth was filled again, then his throat in a suffocating press. Reflexively, he went to draw back and clear his airway, but his head was already flush against the wall. Forcing him to receive. The whine that escaped him was cut off as Rozanov started to move at a languid pace, testing how far he could go before Shane started to choke. He looked up, and the view made his whole body shudder; Rozanov’s lips parted, eyes in a dark, lusty haze, the angle at which he towered over Shane.
“Fuck, look at you. You love this,” Rozanov said, not letting up in the slightest, his pace even and steady. “Maybe you have gotten on your knees for half of town already.”
Shane made a muffled noise of dissent, then shook his head instead, his voice useless with his mouth and throat so full. It was important, for some reason, to inform Rozanov that he hadn’t done this before. Maybe it was that little voice piping up again, as he shook his head, the one shrouded in denial and shame. It was relevant that he was brought to this desperation by the salacious appeal of what those fangs promised, a fantasy so incredible he hardly dared to imagine it before tonight.
Not for the first time, the idea occurred to Shane that Rozanov might be getting into his head, controlling his emotions, prodding at his amygdala to make him chase pleasure; it was not much more outlandish than the fangs. Beyond the cotton fluff that occupied the space between his ears, though, there was a dull awareness that he’d gotten himself in this position, parted his lips, flattened his tongue, and hollowed his cheeks, was doing so while so hard he might honestly black out, if the lack of oxygen didn’t get him first.
“Oh, I know, zaichyk. I am first to take this pretty mouth, hm?”
Shane focused on the low lilt of his voice, the strain of pleasure subtle but present between breaths, the voice of reason melting back pleasantly into obscurity. With his silver necklace still tight in his right palm, he lifted his left to grab at the meat of Rozanov’s thigh, craving another point of contact. His nails dug in further than he intended, seeking purchase, and he didn’t have the clarity of mind to correct himself.
How frustrating, the years he’d sat alone with this nameless want, the years he’d endured consumption by shame and guilt, only for this stranger to waltz into his shop and pull him apart, examine him piecemeal like an autopsy, to read him down to his marrow. Shane didn’t voice any of this; he couldn't, anyway. He let his shoulders slump and stole another greedy look up at the creature who would be his undoing.
With the back of his hand, Rozanov brushed a tear as it slipped from the corner of Shane’s eye, the movement far too gentle for the rough cant of his hips into his mouth. He groaned when Shane looked up at him again, shoving his length in further until his throat spasmed around him involuntarily. He didn’t pull back, and Shane’s nails cut crescents into Rozanov’s thigh in the few seconds he’d been completely airless, making an ugly, pathetic sound around the intrusion. The pressure finally withdrew, and Shane hung his head as a string of coughs ripped through his bruising throat.
“Poor little thing,” Rozanov leaned over and grabbed Shane by the hair, tugging upward.
Shane scrambled to his feet, and Rozanov met him in a scorching kiss, unbothered by where Shane’s mouth had been. Shane was unsteady, his weight thrown forward to collapse any remaining distance between them. Before he could understand, Rozanov hooked his arms under Shane’s thighs and picked him up, easy as anything. Shane wrapped his arms around him, clinging unnecessarily as the man hefted his weight like it was nothing, never breaking their kiss.
He rolled his hips forward, painfully aware of the lack of attention, and made a pitiful sound at the friction until his hips met the cloth-covered countertop. Rozanov palmed at his chest with one hand as the other removed what remained of his clothes, and his boots, and worked at removing Shane’s in turn. He pinched one of Shane’s nipples between his fingers, teasing out a soft gasp.
“Sensitive. You have done this before, with a man?”
Shane shook his head, “No, I… not with anyone.”
Rozanov raised his eyebrows for a brief twitch. He shook his head with a scoff, smiling incredulously, and crashed their lips together again.
A loud crackcrack, crash! sounded outside, and Shane flinched backward as a tree outside snapped under the endless torrent of the storm. He took the opportunity to catch his breath and finally spoke.
“Are you—” Shane cleared his throat, startled by the sound of his own voice. Rozanov bruised it from inside and out, he discerned with a shiver.
“Are you in my head?”
Rozanov smiled, amused. He reached forward and unceremoniously slipped his hand under Shane’s boxers and wrapped his hand around his length. His hand was big, his grip perfectly tight in a single, slow tug up from the base. Shane’s breath came out in a wheeze, like he’d been punched in the gut.
“This feels real, no?”
“No, no, I meant — oh!” Rozanov was stroking him, albeit painfully slowly. Shane hunched forward, his body alight with sensation after being ignored for so long. No one had ever… it felt so good. He struggled to get the words out.
“I meant, are you — controlling me? M-making me?”
“Ah. I see.” Rozanov removed his hand, and Shane felt the loss of it like he might pass out. The man straightened his posture, distancing them slightly, standing unashamed, wearing only his gold necklace.
“Hit me.” Rozanov said.
“Wh — huh?”
Rozanov tapped his own cheek. “Here. Do it, hard.”
Shane blinked a few times, then squeezed his eyes shut before opening them again. When he did, Rozanov was still waiting, smirking expectantly.
“I don’t —”
Scarlet flickered in Rozanov’s eyes; the fleck of fire completed one quick circuit around his iris.
“I said hit me.”
Oh. The words didn’t sound any different, not really, but the feeling was bizarre. A distinct vertigo, as if he’d looked down and found himself at a great height with no floor below his feet. The edges of his vision blurred, and his hand… tingled, like he’d fallen asleep on it and woken with paresthesia.
Shane lifted his arm, and with an open palm, hit Rozanov across the face.
The hit was clean, a crisp smack that echoed throughout the shop. The force of it made Rozanov’s cheek turn, and Shane watched his jaw clench before he turned back to face him, smirking with wild eyes.
“Oh, fuck, fuck I’m sorry I—”
“That’s what it feels like when I get ‘in your head,’ Hollander.”
Rozanov narrowed his eyes and closed the distance between them again with a kiss. He wrapped his hand around Shane’s base again, making him buck forward into the touch, but he didn’t move his wrist an inch. When he pulled back to speak, he stayed close enough for Shane to feel his breath.
“So, answer your own question.”
“I…”
Rozanov held Shane’s chin when he tried to look away.
“Did I make you put your hands on me?”
He couldn’t answer. Rozanov tightened his fist around him.
“Did I make you get on your knees, hm?”
Shane swallowed and shook his head exactly once.
“No.”
“No. I didn’t even fucking ask. You opened your whore mouth because you wanted it.”
Shane’s mouth fell open.“I’m not a — ” he faltered as Rozanov raised an eyebrow in challenge, but pushed on, “I’m not a whore.”
“Hm. Then, I should be on my way?”
Rozanov barely hid his crooked grin, removing his grasp from Shane’s cock one individual finger at a time. Fuck. Shane bit his lip hard, suppressing a whine at the loss of contact, even though he hadn’t been moving his hand at all. The apothecary knew after years of doling out carefully-portioned tonics to frantic mistresses and sweating noblemen that lust made people crazy, made them stupid and careless beyond reason, but feeling it clouding his own mind was another story. He had never understood, until now, why anyone was so crazy about this. A wave of cold washed over him as the man withdrew, a hollowness. Shane would do anything to restore it.
“I have overstayed my welcome. My deepest apologies.”
Without thinking, Shane jutted his hand out and grabbed Rozanov by the wrist. Rozanov cocked his head to the side, obviously amused by the game he was playing with a far too pliant, far too willing victim.
“Stay,” Shane pleaded, and it came out so pathetic that there was no need to add 'please.'
“Why? I come for help, and you fix me.” He looked down pointedly at his hip, where the wound was now undetectable. “All better. Should be done here, no?”
Shane could be cut and dry, and admit that he was going crazy with a searing want he didn’t know what to do with, that he would do practically anything to feel those fangs pierce his skin; but that was what Rozanov was expecting, with that sly grin and easy confidence. Instead, he tried to play along.
“You… haven’t paid yet. For my service.”
“Oh,” Rozanov purred, clearly pleased, “how rude of me.” He leaned in close, lips ghosting over Shane’s. “What do I owe?”
Emboldened, Shane reached his free hand to Rozanov’s waist, bringing his body closer, fixing a firm grip to keep him there.
“Bite me.”
Rozanov scoffed, “This, again? If I taste you, I will kill you,” he warned, then leaned down to kiss Shane’s jaw, following the line to his ear.
“You won’t,” Shane protested. He was entirely unsure where that certainty came from.
An urgency was rising in his chest, making his skin thrum, lightning pinging beneath fingertips. He didn’t ask before wrapping a hand around Rozanov, taking quiet pride in how hard he still was, the tip red where it bobbed at his abdomen. Without thinking, he pumped his fist, not missing the low groan that Rozanov let out; he was bracing his hands on the edge of the countertop, which Shane grew frustrated with.
“Touch me again.”
“Fucking greedy, now? Mind your manners.”
Fuck it. Fine.
“Please. Please touch me again.”
“Touch you where?”
A shaky exhale left his lips. partly in exasperation and partly at the particularly sensitive spot near his ear that Rozanov laved with his tongue. He was being unraveled, the spool of thread that composed him reduced to a tangled heap. The stuttered breath gave him away, making him focus more attention on the skin there.
“My…” Fucking hell, he was really doing this, “my cock. Touch me again. Please.”
“Better,” Rozanov muttered against his neck, finally obliging.
Shane nearly wept at the contact, in combination with the kisses that grew messier against his neck; Shane lolled his head to the side to give him better access, eyes fluttering shut. He worked his hand faster, rolling his wrist towards the tip, using the precum there to ease the glide. The steady rhythm of Rozanov’s hand around him was everything, the grip so perfectly tight, the pace making him buck up into his hand unconsciously, chasing the feeling. Incredibly, he was getting close already, startlingly faster than it normally took on his own. Every time a fang met his skin, Shane’s whole body flinched, seizing in anticipation he couldn’t fucking handle anymore.
“Please,” he managed, breathless, “please. Bite me, I want to feel it.”
Rozanov clicked his tongue, lifting his head and yanking Shane’s head by the hair to look him in the eye. The dark veins under his eyes were prominent again, bulging and angry, his pupils consuming the iris to a sliver in the dim light. There was a faint twitch of his upper lip before he spoke.
“Watch your fucking mouth. You don’t want—”
“I do.” Shane insisted, “I do, I fucking need it.”
Shane abandoned reason, watching as Rozanov pressed his lips into a tight line. His jaw was clenched, and both of his hands moved to Shane’s hips, grip closing around his skin.
“Hollander,” he warned, voice low. Shane ignored him.
“I need to know what it feels like. I don’t care if it hurts,” his breathing was labored, words falling before he could catch them, “I — I want it to. Please, fuck,” Shane squeezed his eyes shut, “I need your teeth in me, I need you, Rozanov, please—”
Rozanov swore in his native tongue, the sound erupting from him in a snarl. The hand already tight in Shane’s hair pulled impossibly tighter, tugging to the side to expose the skin. Shane’s breath caught, and he opened his eyes just in time to see the feral, crazed expression before Rozanov bared his fangs and sank them into the right side of his neck.
“Agh! — fuuuuck…”
Shane couldn’t recall the last time he’d felt this much pain, felt this much anything. The pain was incredible, harsh and stinging and electric. Everything tensed, his shoulders bunching up on reflex, but Rozanov shoved his right shoulder down with a low growl, lest it interfere as he fed.
Seeking purchase, Shane balled his hands into fists at his side, white knuckled, digging crescents into his palms as he gasped for air. In his left hand, the snake pendant pressed into his skin. Maybe, if he pressed hard enough, Hygeia would cleanse him of sickness, sanitize the ugly want and desperate need. Rozanov groaned into his skin and closed his whole body around Shane’s. His right hand remained clamped into Shane’s hair, the other gripped so tight around his hip he was sure the skin would bruise the impression of all five fingers.
The intrusion of the fangs ripped free from his shoulder; the sudden motion choking out a gasp that crashed into a groan as Rozanov’s wet tongue laved the wound.
“Can’t believe I waited so long,” the creature muttered into his skin. “Your taste…” he paused to lick at blood that had descended to his clavicle, groaning at the flavor on his tongue. “Lucky I found you first.”
God, it burned, it stung sharp and acute, the two puncture wounds distinct until the pain ebbing from them blurred into one epicenter. Shane whimpered, not recognizing his own voice. The bite was perfect, excruciating, better than even his imagination, silencing everything in his head to white noise, pure and singular.
Rozanov lapped greedily at his skin, the sound tangling with his deep sounds of satisfaction at the taste. Shane felt the first trickle of blood escape Rozanov’s tongue, felt the warm roll of it down his collar, and shuddered. The sounds tumbling from Rozanov’s mouth were obscene, gluttoral, and Shane dizzily wanted more of it. He reached his trembling hand out, closing around Rozanov’s cock.
“Fuck, good boy,” his words came out slurred, hurried, in a rush to get back to feeding.
Shane’s hips bucked forward at the praise, and Rozanov returned the favor by moving his wrist, but much sloppier, the pace stopping and starting. More loose pearls of blood escaped, cascading slowly down his body.
This time, Rozanov chased them down, flatting his tongue to lap at the deep scarlet blood, tracing the streaks up Shane’s chest. Shane looked down at him, at the fucking mess, and Rozanov working his cock lazily in his big hand, at his darkened eyes. Rozanov’s composure was lacking, and he rocked his hips into Shane’s hand as his mouth closed over Shane’s nipple, swirling his tongue over it. It was all so much — the searing pain in his neck, the wet sucking pressure on his chest, the stuttering pump of Rozanov’s hand and —
Fuck, there really was a lot of blood. He didn’t feel lightheaded, yet, if he isolated the searing lust that dizzied him, but what remained of his self-preservation rang a tinny alarm. What had he said earlier — he had already fed on three people in the past few days. Could his appetite still be so voracious?
“Rozanov,” he huffed, “I should — ah!” he lost focus as a fang teased his nipple, “— stop the bleeding.”
“You have bed here?”
“What? Yes, in the back, but I —”
And that was the end of his sentence, because Rozanov lifted him off the table and started to carry him to the door, his mouth fixed back on his open wound. Shane clung to him, distracted by the press of their bodies together, the steady, firm composition of the creature he’d made a meal of himself for.
Somehow, Rozanov navigated to the back room with his face buried in the crook of Shane’s neck, and rather than throwing him into the bed, Rozanov lowered both of them, unwilling to remove his latch on Shane’s bite. His neck ached terribly, the burn ebbing out into his shoulder. It took a lot out of Shane to focus, especially with the visual of Rozanov straddling him, face burrowing in his neck, in his own bed. How long had he buried dreams of taking handsome strangers here, chasing pleasure in the dark?
“W-wait, Rozanov, hold on—” Shane threaded his fingers through Rozanov’s hair, parting the sea of golden curls, and pulled him off with some effort.
Fuck. His face was a mess, blood smeared all over his lower jaw — Shane’s blood — telangiectasias dark around his eyes. There was still a faint scar on his upper lip where the necklace had burned him. His breathing was deep and slow, and Shane’s breath caught when Rozanov darted his tongue out to taste the blood on his lips.
“Is what you wanted, Hollander?” he asked, looking more than a little dazed, drunk on him. "You bleed beautifully for me.”
Shane was sure he was supposed to be saying something, but Rozanov towered over him in bed, his body bracketed on either side by his thighs, the sinful expression boring into him, his cock hard against his lower abs, the blood all over him… oh, fuck, the blood.
“No? You want me to stop? Cannot take the pain?”
Rozanov leaned back down, bracing with one arm near Shane’s head, and with his free hand pressed his thumb into one of the puncture wounds. Shane whimpered, the pressure lighting up his whole nervous system, and for some ungodly reason bucked his hips up into Rozanov’s body. The friction against his cock had all his wires tangled and confused.
“It — it’s not the pain, it’s the blood — I shouldn’t lose too much more.”
“Not the pain? Yes, I can see that.” Rozanov pressed his thumb in harder, and Shane squeezed his eyes shut. “You fucking love it. You like that it hurts.” Shane made a weak sound of protest, promptly ignored.“Do not pretend. You moan for it, sound so good for me.”
Shane shook his head, his entire face scrunched in pain and embarrassment. His face was wet; when had he started crying?
“Look at me.”
He obeyed, opening his eyes just enough to meet Rozanov’s. Shane registered distantly that he’d gone doll-eyed, a fractal haze around the edges of his vision, a lethargic delay to his thoughts, honey stuck between the synapses of every neuron.
The creature withdrew his pressure on the puncture wound, instead brushing Shane’s cheek with the back of his fingers, wiping a tear track, a gentle touch that could be mistaken for a lover’s gesture. Shane’s eyes lulled half-lidded, mindlessly leaning his head into the caress.
“Pretty thing,” Rozanov cooed, “I understand.”
Pretty? Shane looked up with a furrowed brow, questioning the warm fuzz in his head in response to the word, but abandoned the thought as Rozanov parted his lips. The creature pressed his tongue up against the roof of his mouth; the spot, he noticed, that Shane had traced with his fingers earlier.
“Pain and pleasure. Easy to confuse, no?”
“Rozanov…”
The creature, clearly not yet sated, was already ducking down into Shane’s neck. Shane flinched when he realized he’d opened his mouth — was he going to bite again? But no; he was pressing something wet into his aching wound, saliva from his tongue pooling in the mess he’d made. It was —
“Oh, fuck!”
Shane’s vision whited out, everything whited out, reduced only to acute ecstasy that started at his neck and radiated outward in kaleidoscoping spirals. His eyes rolled back in rapture. The pain was consumed entirely, forgotten, his skin alight with a suffocating pleasure; it was the only thing he could feel, aside from the lazy lapping of Rozanov’s tongue, which started to trail down his chest. Shane choked out a sound, a half-sob.
“Feels better now?”
“Yes, yes, fuck, what is this?” It was a miracle he could move his mouth to form the words. It was so much, so euphoric, so wholly unparalleled. His vision returned lethargically, consumed with phosphenes that took too long to dissipate.
“Reward, for my most willing prey.”
“Who wouldn’t want — oh, oh fuck, Rozanov,” the thought was aborted halfway, when Rozanov finished tonguing at Shane’s nipple and continued further, kissing hungrily down his torso.
The feeling was indescribable, each touch a lightning strike that forked out in erratic webs of electricity. The analgesic properties of whatever Rozanov applied were remarkable — some kind of opioid? It was just so good.
“Most prey run when they see fangs, zaichyk,” Rozanov said into his skin, making his way down Shane’s body with his mouth. “Did not think I had any ‘firsts’ left, until you begged me to have you.”
“This feels — fuck, this feels fucking…” It was a true challenge to speak, wading through the syrupy sweet sensation of bliss in his mind to move the right muscles. “Why didn’t you do this the first time?”
“You wanted to hurt, no?”
“That’s…” Shane was too gone to process that.
“I know, Hollander. You want it to be my fault. Big, bad night monster held you down, made you bleed.”
Shane nodded weakly, brows creased, whining as Rozanov paused to suck a bruise into his hip.
“Is too late for that. You beg me to bite you, beg for pain. You can pretend, but I know. Darling of town, sweet apothecary Hollander, fucking painwhore.”
Never in his life had Shane heard anyone speak like this, and certainly not to him. The attention was dizzying, the unashamed filth of his words, and the low, dangerous way he said them. Hygeia, Shane thought deliriously, had her hands full with him.
“It doesn’t hurt,” Shane said, hardly a convincing protest. It was true now, but there wasn’t any denying that he’d been whimpering and writhing for it a moment ago, fascinated by the intensity of a feeling he spent his life helping people chase away.
“Tell me, then. How does it feel?”
Before he could answer, Rozanov wrapped a hand around his cock, stroking him with a pointedly agonizing pace, slow and lazy. It felt like so much more, even as the intensity of the ecstasy started to wane. Whenever he saw to his own pleasure, it was a simple, hurried affair; maintenance for his body. The way Rozanov touched him was so different, so purposeful and intense. He watched Shane’s face contort in pleasure, waiting for an answer.
“This is… I — I can’t—”
“Mm, venom making you too stupid to answer me. We can’t have that.”
The highest of the full-body ecstasy had faded, but the pain was still dulled in his neck; Shane reached a hand up to the wound, the motion clumsy and uncoordinated. To his surprise, the wound felt like it had closed over; it was still wet, but no fresh blood oozed out of the puncture site.
Shane didn’t dwell on the scientific implications of that for too long, because Rozanov’s hand was still moving around him with that perfect pressure again, and his mouth had made its way to his pelvis. The image of his bloodied face, disarmingly handsome and wild with bloodlust, so close to his bare cock… would he return the favor? The thought made him twitch.
“You like pain better, don't you?”
With his elbows propping him up, Rovanov used his free hand to press his first two fingers into the highest part of Shane’s thigh, where the femoral vessels ran, the artery thrumming rapidly under his thumb. Shane saw that expression on Rozanov’s face again, his tight jaw, his hawk-eyed focus on the skin beside his thumb, watching Shane’s pulse under his finger. No matter how unworthy he might be, Shane felt studied, the subject of a singular attention, and it felt almost as good as the venom.
“Yes.”
Rozanov’s eyes snapped up to Shane’s.
“I do. I…” he fisted a hand into Rozanov’s hair, “I like the pain better. But don’t— don’t take too much, okay? I don’t want to — mmph!”
Two twin fangs bore into the meat of Shane’s thigh before he could finish. The pain struck first, the sharp ivory making a clean slice through layers of skin before they nicked a vessel, and Rozanov was moaning into his taste again. This time, he produced the venom sooner, while his teeth were still inside, the effects ebbing into him and completing the circuit up to his brain.
Painpleasurepain rocketed through him, and he was lost to it, swimming endlessly in sensation. A teary-eyed glance down was an absolute terror, and Shane registered that Rozanov had pierced the artery, bright crimson making a mess of them both, and the sheets below them. He tried to blink the tears away, but his vision remained a slight blur. Fuck.
“Rozanov. You should — you have to close it.” Shane tried, and tugged on his hair to find his arm weaker than he expected. Not a great sign.
“Shhh,” Rozanov dismissed him, between wet laps of his tongue.“Not done.”
He protested, despite the wretched truth that he wanted to sink into it, to give in to the pain-pleasure. Maybe it was because he could see this scene more clearly than his neck, but there was a decent amount of blood coming from his leg. God, Rozanov’s hand was still wrapped around his cock.
“You — oh, fuck, you have to stop, there’s too much…”
Shane tried pulling on his hair again, but the creature growled possessively into his leg, prying his hand away by the wrist and pinning it to the bed. A thrill of panic lifted him out of his daze. He really was going to pass out if he went on like this, and there was no saying if he’d wake up given the state Rozanov was in.
His train of thought faltered, screeching on the tracks. There was blood on Shane’s chest, dark red splotches forming where Rozanov had sucked bruises into the skin. He was painfully hard, leaking down the shaft into Rozanov’s working hands. His thigh was a fucking terror, in part covered by a head of perfect curls.
Fighting through blood loss and lust and pain and pleasure, Shane tried to gain his bearings, and took a mental inventory. There was no moving, really, the whole of his lower body smothered by the creature. His one wrist remained pinned, removing it as an option. But the other, which had been clenched at his side, had a distinct, uncomfortable press in his palm. Oh! His necklace was still in his hand, the silver pendant he’d been clinging to as he balled his fists in pain or pleasure or both. Before he resigned himself to violence, he tried to get through with words again.
Any momentum Shane had stuttered to a stop when he looked down at Rozanov was ravaging his bloodied thigh, completely gone to the world otherwise. There was a distinct desperation to the way Rozanov clung to his body, the way he savored him. Needed him.
“Rozanov…” Shane sighed, then bit down on his lip, hard, before he said something stupid, admitted that he wanted to be consumed, that being a sustaining force for such a beautiful creature would make him feel whole, fill a cavernous space inside his being he didn’t realize was empty. He was supposed to be begging for his life, but the reverence with which the creature was treating him, as if he needed him to live…
Shane shook his head to dismiss the thought, and found that his vision swayed; he shouldn’t wait any longer. He took a deep breath, adjusted the grip of the pendant in his sweaty palm, and jutted his hand out, pressing the pendant into the side of Rozanov’s neck.
The creature hissed with pain, the sizzle of burning skin cutting through the heady atmosphere. He didn’t completely extricate himself from Shane, but the pressure on his body eased some, just enough for him to slide up and out of the cage of his arms. Shane sat up, pressed his back into the headboard, and planted his feet, holding out the pendant like one might a cross to a demon.
The demon in question had a cross of his own; the gold pendant catching a sliver of light. He held a hand to his neck, protecting his wound as it healed under his palm. His face was a mess, blood smeared over his lips and chin, some on his chest. Rozanov turned to Shane, wearing a wry smile instead of a furious scowl, and Shane wasn’t sure what to make of that.
“I’m sorry! You — you weren’t listening!” he gestured to his, holy fuck, still very-much-bleeding thigh, “You have to close this. Rozanov, please.”
“What happened to begging me to feed, hm?”
“Well, what happened to not wanting to kill me!” Shane sputtered back, his hand trembling.
The creature closed the distance again, situating himself between Shane’s legs, leaving his wounded thigh exposed.
“You think you scare me, with your little charm?”
“I didn’t mean — god, please just close the wound so I don't die naked in my own bed.”
This got an honest laugh out of Rozanov, but the levity of the sweet sound was gone as Shane watched him press his tongue to the roof of his mouth again. Keeping his eyes locked on Shane’s, he leaned over his bloody thigh and spat the venom onto the puncture sites. The euphoria came quickly, and Shane couldn’t help but double over with the sudden pleasure.
Rozanov smeared his thumb over the closing wound, blood and spit and venom mixing on his thigh.
“That is all you need?”
Once Shane looked down to confirm that yes, the venom worked, and the wound was shut, he was confronted with the very beautiful, very big, very naked man straddling him. So… no, that was not all he needed. They were both still hard, which Shane found a little miraculous given the blood-stained sheets, but the dizziness might have been more in panic than he’d originally credited. He was still holding the silver pendant, though his hand was resting at his side again, removing the threat.
Fuck, they looked good slotted together like this. Shane looked up, tried his best attempt at a pointed stare, trying to project his desire into the creature’s mind, somehow. Rozanov chuckled, shaking his head.
“No, no. Does not work like that. Tell me.”
Desperate, and maybe still a little high from the waning effects of the venom, Shane shifted his hips, the sensitive skin of his cock rubbing against Rozanov’s. He instantly shuddered, strung along for what felt like fucking years without release.
He nearly sobbed when Rozanov grabbed his hips and tutted.
“You heard me. Tell me what you want.”
Shane looked up at him, eyes pricking with desperate tears. He still couldn’t say it. His attention caught on the faint scar persisting on Rozanov’s upper lip, where he’d been burned by the silver. It was healing, albeit slowly, as was the newer, angrier mark on his neck. He leaned in, sighing with pleased relief when Rozanov obliged and met his lips. He kissed the same way he fed; with plenty of tongue, and a decisive intensity, like he needed Shane to live and made no effort to pretend otherwise. It was intoxicating, and he did his best to keep up, slipping his free hand up into his hair, carding through the soft curls. Iron and sex hit his nose, his own blood soon coating his tongue as they kissed with messy fervor. Before he could talk himself out of it, Shane found the little scar with his tongue to mark the spot and bit down hard.
With a sharp wince of breath, Rozanov backed out of the kiss, but not far, their breath still mingling. He looked back at Shane with wild eyes, his lip twitching as the wound closed a second time, a few beads of blood escaping before the fibrils sealed the wound. Shane watched them fall, watched the wine-red blood line the creature’s bottom lip. Rozanov’s tongue found the slight groove in his skin, tracing over it.
“You little—”
“You like it too,” Shane said, breathless.
Pure pride shone through Rozanov’s crooked smile. Shane was overcome with the realization, his mind running miles a minute. This impossible, beautiful creature, all power and command, capable of making Shane do anything he wanted with a persuasive word, smiling wickedly with a lip Shane had split — twice. And he’d just… let him. He liked it. What had Shane done to deserve such an honor?
“I tell you this earlier. I am good with pain,” he tilted his head, goading, as Shane had turned his head away.
“Now you are shy? You had my cock in your mouth a few minutes ago, and now you won’t look in my eyes.” Rozanov grabbed Shane’s chin, turning it to face him, then took his hand — the one still holding the pendant.
And held it up to his own throat, hovering inches from the slow-healing scar Shane had just impressed there.
“You do not run from me,” Rozanov stated, nodding his head at the silver. “You do not fight me. Why? Tell me.”
Shane’s eyes danced back and forth between Rozanov’s, brows strewn. Rozanov had let go of his wrist, but he kept it hovering there, the silver charm swaying slightly as his hand trembled. Why? He almost laughed.
“Why? You — you’re—” Shane shook his head slightly, at a loss.
The fracture in his chest had made a clean split through, his sternum perfectly cleaved down the center, revealing contents that were not designed to see light. His dream, he understood, was a premonition of this moment, the precise second he became irreparable. Shane couldn’t parse through in this state, but he had been undone, unmade, something irreversibly released from a box he could never again lock.
“You’re something out of a dream,” he settled on, “you could’ve killed me the second I treated you, or — or forced me to do whatever you wanted, with your voice. But you keep… looking at me, like I’m…” he faltered, feeling his heart thrash against his chest as he whispered, “like I’m something.”
Rozanov’s upper lip twitched, his breathing slow and deep. Even now, his attention bored holes into Shane, consuming him. He was smiling, still, though the expression contorted into something darker.
“You think too highly of me, zaichyk. I have made no promise to let you live, when I am done with you.”
Rozanov finally, finally reached down between them, taking both of their cocks in one hand and stroking them together. Shane’s eyes fluttered shut, his shoulders slumping.
“There you go,” Rozanov purred, giving Shane a once-over. “Red suits you.”
Shane stuttered out a pitiful sound as pleasure sparked through him, immediately bucking his hips up, the rhythm haphazard. He started to withdraw his outstretched hand, to remove the meaningless, empty threat of silver, but Rozanov grabbed his arm. As Shane forced his eyes open, panting, in the rough slide of skin against skin, Rozanov twisted his arm so that he bared his wrist to the creature. Holding the chain tight in his fist, the snake pendant dangled dangerously close to Rozanov’s face as he kissed the inside of his wrist.
“You are unbelievable,” Rozanov said, “you’d let me do anything I wanted to you, wouldn’t you?”
With four just-healed punctures in his skin, his own blood barely dried all over his naked body, and every breath leaving in a whimper on Rozanov’s upstroke, there was no use in denying it. Shane nodded deliriously, a steady stream of broken whines falling from his lips.
Shane was laid bare, ribs wide open to reveal his beating heart. The squeeze of Rozanov’s hand around the ventricles melted deeper, the rhythm contorting from twisting torsades to tranquil asystole. The fibers adapted, muscles relaxing to near atrophy as practiced fingers kept the pace. Blood passed through him without labor, a phantom of laminar flow like the tides. Shane wasn’t sure how he’d go without it now, the perfect pressure around the chambers, a pacemaker he’d become addicted to instantly, with no way to wean off.
As his mind began to slip, anticipation building at the threat of a bite, he fixed his free hand at Rozanov’s hip, gripping it tight, a weak attempt to ground himself. Rozanov brought his wrist closer to his mouth and lapped at the skin, avoiding the chain of the necklace by millimeters.
“Fuck,” Rozanov groaned, “you’re gone. You can stop me, Hollander. So simple,” he kissed the inside of his wrist again, slow and deliberate, “one twitch of your hand could blind me.”
The reminder fell on deaf ears. Rozanov’s pace picked up between them, the friction eased where one or both of them had leaked into his working palm. It was delicious, so different from how it felt alone, the expanse of his calloused hand that Shane had no control over. The shame was gone, replaced with more base instinct, long denied and resisted, bursting at the seams from years of neglect. Shane felt it in the tips of his toes, in the hollow of his chest, in the marrow of his bones, all buzzing and desperate and hysterical.
“But you won't," Rozanov said. It wasn’t a question.
“I won’t,” Shane replied, surprised to hear it escape him as a near-sob, “Rozanov, please.”
What was he begging for? Shane was sure there was an answer, but there was pleasure and pain and delirium where the thoughts should be. All he knew was that he wanted, and after a lifetime of withholding desire, holding it close to his chest and suffocating it, letting himself have it was fucking transcendent. He wanted to look down between them at the scene, burn it into his memory, but the creature had opened his mouth — his fangs pressing into his skin, but not breaking it — and Shane couldn’t rip his eyes away from Rozanov’s. Shane was very recently in the business of mindlessly chasing pleasure, the taste of hedonism so addicting that it validated why he’d denied himself of it for so long.
Unthinking, Shane pushed his wrist into Rozanov’s fangs.
“Please,” he forced past his lips, gasping as a tug pulled in his gut, warning that he was close. It was so different when it wasn’t his own hand, when he wasn't ashamed, the pleasure welling up in knots and tangles, frantic under his skin.
“Have me, Rozanov. I’m yours.”
Rozanov, intent on undoing Shane past any chance of repair, obliged.
With effort, Shane kept his eyes open as the fangs plunged into his wrist, past the resistance of skin that gave way to soft tissue to tap the vessels below. Rozanov kept his eyes open, too, allowing Shane the incredible privilege of witnessing the vessels in his sclera pulse scarlet as he fed. The intimacy was unparalleled, a perfect surrender; Shane offering his life in an outstretched hand, Rozanov's lips one twitch away from death in silver.
Blood trickled down his own wrist, and Shane whimpered alongside the indulgent moans of the feeding creature. He did not dare move his hand, neglecting Hygeia and dismissing the shame he brought her. His attention could not escape the pain, but some was siphoned to the desperate fervor of Rozanov’s hand, pumping them both rough and fast, the edges of Shane’s vision blurring.
“Rozanov,” he breathed, the name punched out of him, “I — I’m —”
“Da, that’s it, come for me,” Rozanov’s hand left his arm, grabbing Shane’s hair at the back of his head and pulling tight.
Shane sobbed something out; his name, maybe, or a plea, and pure snow-white tessellated over his vision as he obeyed. He registered a deep groan, the wet drip of blood descending past his elbow.
“You were perfect.”
Shane heard each syllable form at the shell of his ear, felt it settle deep in his chest, and offered no resistance as his eyes rolled, his vision seamlessly transitioning from white to black.
———
Shane dreamed again of the woods, of a predator’s pursuit hot on his heels. This time, he did not sprint until his legs gave out. He slowed to a stop, descended with ease to his knees, and closed his eyes, waiting for the storm to take him. When he woke to the sun through his window, glinting sharply off the several feet of snow, Shane did not think for a second that the encounter was fictitious. He did not look for the puncture wounds or search the store for confirmation that Rozanov had really visited him in the night.
Shane knew, with the sureness of his own name, a certainty of sunrise, that he’d been unmade.