Here is a snippet of my vampire au: I am trying to finish and post it by Halloween, but we shall see how that goes!
Techno stares through the bars at Phil. The man - the vampire - looks pathetic. His usually neat robes are in disarray, covered in blood and dirt from where the Hunters had thrown him to the ground while restraining him. The cuffs are off him now that he’s secured behind the silver bars, but there are red rings around his wrists that match the redness surrounding the blue of his eyes. Techno doesn’t know why he’s still hiding when his lies have already been revealed, why he’s still pretending to be pathetic, crumpled on the floor of the cage like he can’t move.
Techno can’t stop looking at him.
There’s a half-formed plan in the back of his mind as he watches the other Hunters leave, assures them that he’ll be along as soon as he makes sure the prisoner is secured. They leave silence in their wake, Phil unnaturally still on the floor of the cage as Techno pauses, unsure of what to do next. He owes a debt to this man, a life saved, and to leave it there rankles. Even if this is a monster.
“What do you want,” Phil’s voice is raspy, low and angry. Nothing like the man, the vampire, that had bandaged Techno’s wounds with gentle hands. (He still doesn’t know why. Doesn’t know how to ask.)
He steps closer to the bars, one hand on his knife. Just in case. The other one he stretches inside the cage. Impossibly, Phil goes even more still.
“I owe you my life. Drink, heal yourself,” he says, steels himself against the sting of teeth, the feeling of being drained.
It doesn’t come. Phil uncurls, pushes himself up from the floor. There’s a rip in his left wing. Techno didn’t see it before. He doesn’t know if it’ll heal with blood, but it’s easier to look at that than at Phil’s eyes, blue and brilliant and burning.
“I killed him for you,” he says, low and seething and angry. “I killed him, and you come speak to me of debts? Let me out of this cage and I will take your debt from your flesh.” Betrayal drips from every word, pain and anger and spite, and Techno pulls his hand back, resists the urge to step back. There is no way for him to get out of the cage, but a trickle of fear runs down Techno’s spine anyways.
“He had to die,” he whispers, knows it’s the wrong thing to say as soon as it passes his lips. Phil snarls, makes a move like he’s going to leap at Techno despite the silver bars between them. He could break them, maybe. If they didn’t burn his flesh to the bone before he got through.
“I’m sorry,” he says, even if he’s not. He is sorry that Phil is a monster, that he had a monster in his basement. He is sorry that he got attached.
He is not sorry the other vampire died.
He thinks Phil would kill him if he said so, bars or no.
As it is, Phil snarls one more time before turning his back, wings pressed close. Techno waits for a long moment of silence before he slips out of the room. He still has a life debt twice over, and he needs to fix it somehow.
