Dark Places - Shane Barrett, Sierra Aguirre-Stoker

Dark alleys don’t bother Shane Barrett anymore.
They used to, when he was a kid running home from wrestling practice. Some of his teammates used to tease him for it. He was the tallest and biggest in his class, at least until they’d switched the high schools into one building when he was in tenth grade, but he always refused to take the shortcut that would have saved him a twenty-minute trip home.
There was something about the shadows that scared him, that some instinctive part of him knew to stay away from.
He wishes his instincts had been a little more accurate about what to be afraid of. Because danger had never found him in a dingy shortcut, never leaped out at him from behind an overflowing dumpster. It had walked up to him holding a red Solo cup and laughing in a room full of neon lights and crowded with witnesses.
So he’s not afraid of alleys anymore.
It’s a good thing, too, because the fastest way from his and Sierra’s shared apartment to the Luna Club is mostly composed of them. It’s not like they live in the best part of town to start with (they can’t afford it even with both their paychecks, and Shay wouldn’t be allowed in most of the buildings, and even if he was, he’d be looked at like a ticking time bomb), and the club’s district is no better.
Usually, Sierra drops him off on the way to work, given a hunter and a vamp club bouncer’s schedules line up pretty well (or he’s on his way to Chimera too if a case needs them all hands on deck). But after the fight they just had, there’s no chance a ride will be anything but strained silences or a continuation of the sharp words flung back and forth between them.
They both need space. Sierra needs a chance to drive to work alone, turning her radio up to a volume that would make Shay curl into his seat in agony and blasting her screaming rock mixtape at full volume. And he needs to walk in the dark.
Not that it’s dark to him. He can see perfectly fine, even as the sky edges away from the red shades of evening to replace them with the indigo and gold of city nights.
There’s someone ahead of him in the alley. Leaning on a wall, smoking a cigarette he can smell from where he is. A stray ray of the last sunlight catches on her hair, and for a moment, it turns the crimson of fresh blood, of a cup of terribly mixed frat house punch, of the age-old human knowledge of something dangerous and deadly. Something bred as deep in the bones as the fear of dark places.
It can’t be her.
But even as he turns, to avoid the corner, to find another way, he knows it is.
He can feel her.
He’s felt her for days. It’s her voice that’s haunted his dreams, crept into the cracks in his thoughts, sharpened his words and raised his defenses like the darkness used to.
She turns, the only red still illuminating her the faint glow of the end of the cigarette she tosses in a flickering arc to the ground and smashes under the heel of her boot.
She still looks like she did nearly twenty years ago.
“You came,” she says, voice smooth and velvet with the sharpness of a knife hidden somewhere in its depths.
He’s not thinking like himself. He doesn’t think like this. She’s in his head.
She has been for hours. Days.
Maybe weeks.
He needs to run.
But he can’t.
“I knew you would,” she says. “I just had to tear you away from that human.” Her lip curls in disgust. “But I’ll make sure you’re free of her. Then it will be just us. Forever.”
Somehow, some part of him can still register that she’s lying. That she’s said this to a hundred people just like him, over centuries of cruelty and conniving and selfish lust.
But he still can’t run.
She moves toward him, a shadow peeling itself from the dark wall and taking on physical form. A combination of crimson and pitch darkness. Fear itself taking form.
He hates that he sees her how she sees herself.
That her voice twists his thoughts and turns them into her lyrical, entrancing phrases.
That he can’t push her out, because by the time he saw her, it was too late.
It was so much too late.
That he didn’t see his short temper, his flashes of anger, of fear, for what they were.
That he let her tear him and Sierra apart.
That whatever happens next, it’s his fault.

...

There’s so much blood. It’s the first thing he notices. Then he realizes it’s on his hands.
But it’s not the smell of hot wet iron or the stickiness drying in the creases of his palms that sends him stumbling backward.
Sierra is standing in front of him, practically face to face, or as close as that comes with nearly eight inches of a height difference between them. There’s a chunk of twisted metal, that looks like it was ripped from the wreckage of a destroyed car, stabbed inches deep into her side.
There’s blood on his hands.
No. No. No.
She sways slightly, and he realizes that he was the only thing holding her up. He catches her, body moving on some kind of automatic instinct, to lower her to the floor without making her injury worse.
There’s a gun in her hand, but he doesn’t feel any pain, he doesn’t know what she…
She’s looking past him, eyes focused like she gets when she’s doing threat assessment in the middle of a hunt. He turns instinctively to follow her gaze.
There’s a body on the floor. Red hair fanning out around a face marred by a bloody wound in the forehead.
A loud crack cutting through the haze in his vision, the humming in his head, the puppet strings in his limbs…
The echoes dying away, being pushed out by his own thoughts, his own words, his own voice.
She was gone.
He looks from the body to Sierra’s hand, white-knuckled around her Beretta.
“Is she…”
“No,” Sierra says, wincing in a way that makes her shudder a little, probably jarring the jagged slice of metal in her side. “But she’s not going anywhere.” She sets the gun down on the concrete beside her. “I guess the Morris Avengers teaching me how to stop a vamp in their tracks with a silver bullet headshot wasn’t completely useless.”
“I thought you’d have aimed for the heart,” he says, choosing to stick to the familiar banter instead of acknowledging the likely outcome of the situation.
“Couldn’t get a clear angle for it,” Sierra says. “Next time try being shorter.”
He still can’t remember what happened but his mind can fill in the gaps. Sierra intentionally pushing herself forward, driving the metal even further into her body, using the motion to get her line of fire past him, over his shoulder, to the vampire who was using him as her shield.
She’s always been good at turning her pain into ferocity.
“Help me up,” She says, in a voice that leaves no room for argument.
Shay tries anyway. “Where do you think you’re going?”
She doesn’t answer, just reaches for a stake from her belt.
“Don’t.” He pushes her hand down. “She’s old, but she’s not that old. There’ll still be a skull with a silver 9 mil right in the middle of it.” With her record, Sierra’s career will be over if she’s so much as suspected of a kill that falls outside pure self-defense.
“She’s not going to get another chance at you.” She looks at him. “And no vampire can kill their sire. So don’t even try to tell me you’ll do it and take the fall. And don’t even think about starting in with some crap about being a better person than her and letting her live. The agency won’t, not for long. Not when she might have other victims out there who could turn at any time.”
He looks down at his hands. He barely remembers what it was like to be human.
“The sooner she’s gone, the sooner they get their lives back. And the sooner you do too.” She winces. “You’re right, though. Forensics is definitely going to know what happened.” She reaches for her gun. “Might as well do this the easy way.”
He doesn’t like it. But he has to admit, there’s something comforting in the thought of it being over, and over for good. And it doesn’t look like Sierra is going to give up on the idea.
“You’re not getting up just yet,” he insists, clawing at the hem of his shirt and tearing away a chunk.
He knows better than to pull the metal back out.
He’d been working on a construction site one night, back when he was still human, and watched someone get run through with a hunk of rebar protruding from a wall. The guy had been in shock the first few minutes, and then started panicking and thrashing and yelling, trying to get himself free.
Shay heard how it ended later, when he ran into one of the guys he used to work with in a bar over Friday night beers.
The moment he’d seen the blood, he’d felt something in him howl. And he’d bolted, terrified of what that dark monster in his veins might do if he stayed. He’d gotten a call the next morning from the foreman, chewing him out for leaving without notice and telling him he was fired and there were ten guys who would take his place.
This time, he can’t run.
And he really can’t think about what he heard that night weeks later in the back of a smoky bar.
That won’t be Sierra. He won’t let it be.
He presses the cloth to the edges of the wound, wrapping the embedded metal the best he can.
She saved him. It’s up to him to return the favor.

...

The shot echoes in the empty room, the recoil kicking Sierra back into Shay’s hold a little tighter. She drops her arm, letting the gun slip free of her fingers and hit the floor, and looks down at the body that’s aged at least a century in a second.
“I’ve been waiting a long time for this.” Sierra says. “Thought Emma was going to beat me to it.” She half-smiles, but it’s a strained grimace.
“And you can rub it in her face when we tell her all about it,” he says, repositioning her so he can keep pressure on her wound and settle her into a semi-comfortable position against the wall. She hisses and gasps, but he can’t afford to let go. “I’m sorry.”
Sierra shakes her head, not bothering to wipe the blood off her lips. “It wasn’t your fault.”
Maybe she’s right, but it’s still his hand that left the bruises on her cheek, still his snarls she’s going to hear in her nightmares. If she’s lucky enough to survive to have them at all.
His hands join hers over the growing stain on her stomach.
It’s still him who slammed a jagged chunk of sheet metal into her side.
It’s slowly sinking in that it’s just the two of them here. Well, aside from the currently very much desiccated corpse of the vampire who turned him. He doesn’t even know her name.
That’s not something he wants to think about at the moment.
“You didn’t bring backup?”
“I didn’t have time for backup.” Sierra winces. “I called Pete. He should…he should be coming.” She fumbles her phone out of her pocket with one hand, unlocks it, and hits dial.
She has to. Shay can’t use her smartphone. The phone’s screen won’t recognize a vampire’s finger as something alive to respond to.
She sets the phone down on the ground beside him, and both her hands join Shay’s again, pressing down on the blood-soaked fabric around the metal.
“We’re on our way.” Pete says. “I already told them to bring a vamp containment team and a medical crew.”
“Sierra’s gonna need it.” Shay doesn’t recognize his voice, the way it cracks and wavers. He still half expects to hear his sire’s voice inside his own.
She was only in his head for…how long was he with her? He can’t remember.
The call beeps and hangs up, most likely struggling to connect through all the metal in this building. It looks like an old machine shop of some kind. He’s not sure how he got here. He’s not sure what happened.
“They’re on their way.” Sierra sighs, looking past him to the pile of ash that used to be a vamp on the floor. “I can’t wait to explain this one to Maira.” The sarcasm is dripping from her voice almost as thickly as the blood from her lips.
“She…” he closes his eyes, even staring at the ground only shows him the growing pool of blood. “I let her in.” He hates that when it comes to that vampire, all he ever remembers is red. Red Solo cups. Red hair. Red haze that filled his head the second she spoke to him. Red blood staining his hands and Sierra’s clothes.
“None of this was your fault. She lied to you, manipulated you, and took advantage of you.” Sierra says, voice choked around pain and what sounds like blood in her throat now.
“I should have been stronger than that. Emma taught me…”
“Emma knows because it happened to her too. She almost killed Uncle John when she was turned.” Sierra coughs, blood staining her cracked lips and trickling down her chin. It looks like she’s the vampire now.
The thought makes some dark part of his mind wonder, for a split second, if she’d want to be turned. If she’d prefer a guarantee of some kind of life over the uncertainty of waiting for help to come.
But she still has a Lay to Rest order on her file. She still doesn’t want to be like him.
This is what she wants. You have to let her have it.
Besides, he can’t inflict the same thing on her that he lives with now. She would never be able to trust him or herself again, as long as he was more than a pile of ash. There’s no such thing as a healthy relationship between a vampire and their sire, as far as he knows.
He can’t ruin what they have now, even if it means letting it die.
The part of him that still clings to some of its humanity has known that all along.
He wouldn’t wish this life on anyone. Especially not her.
Her almost silent “I’m sorry,” cuts through the fog in his head.
“What are you sorry for?”
“Letting you go.” She swallows. “If we hadn’t fought…you wouldn’t have been…out there on your own.”
“It’s not your fault either. She would have killed you to get to me, if she had to.” She still may have done that.
“She could have tried.” Sierra smiles, teeth stained red. “I’m s’posed to…have your back.”
“You did. You got her out of my head.” Shay says quietly.
“We were good together, weren’t we?”
“Still are. You don’t get to check out this easy. Pete will stake me if I let you die.”
She almost chuckles. “Don’t worry. I haven’t given up on me yet. But…you’re free of her for good now. You don’t need to hang out with a hunter anymore.”
“That’s not why I’ve stayed.” Truth be told, he’s almost forgotten his deal with Chimera included them doing their best to track down his sire.
“You don’t need someone else who’s only capable of taking from you.” Sierra coughs, turning her head away from him to wipe blood onto her shoulder.
“If anything, you should be running away from me. I’m the one who stabbed you.”
“And I’ve been dragging you around without any real commitment for two and a half years.” She looks up at him. “Knowing full well you…cared more about whatever the hell it is we have than I ever did. The best I could do for you was give you some chance at a life of your own.” She takes a wet-sounding breath. “You’re free of her now. You get to choose where you go from here.”
“Hey. Stop talking. We can have this conversation when you’re not bleeding out.” He presses down harder and regrets it a little when she winces. “But for the record, if you didn’t care, you wouldn’t be here right now. You wouldn’t have come after me.”
“Caring fucking hurts.”
He nods. “I guess that’s kind of the point.” He swallows. “I don’t think you don’t care. And I have never wanted you to be more invested than you are.”
“You just…deserve better.”
“So do you.” He takes a shaky breath. He brushes back a strand of her hair out of the blood crusting in the corner of her mouth. “You did the pushing, but I did the running. And I shouldn’t have.” He looks at her. “If you were anything like her, you wouldn’t have come looking for me. She left me to fend for myself, to change alone, to figure all of this out alone. You came looking for me, and you fought for me. That’s all I want.”

...

Sierra’s phone buzzes, jumping lightly against the concrete floor. She reaches for it and swipes a blood-crusted finger across the screen. “Yeah, Pete?” Shay doesn’t like the sound of her voice.
“We’re here, but medical is having some trouble figuring out how to get to you. The windows on the first and second floor are all secured with bars, and there’s a car halfway inside the first floor entrance.”
“Oh. Yeah. I might have…uh…driven my car through a door.”
Shay shakes his head. “Might have, huh?”
“I’ve never been one for subtle entrances. And at least then I knew where her attention was going to be.”
“Fire escape?” Shay asks.
“Bottom part’s missing, this place has been abandoned for a long time,” Pete says. “We’ll try and get the bars off the windows, but it’s going to take some time.”
Time she doesn’t have. Shay’s been forcing his instincts back for the better part of half an hour, forcing back the hunger surging at the sight of blood, but he can feel how much Sierra’s lost and how fast she’s still losing it. By the time they get through the defenses on this place…
He looks from the phone to her, and sees the same awareness in her eyes.
“They can’t get to us. Not in time. So we’re gonna have to get you to them.”
She nods.
He turns back to the phone. “We’re coming to you. Meet us at the bottom of the fire escape.”
Sierra hangs up the call, then looks up at him. “Give me my wrist cuff.”
“Huh?”
“Something to bite down on. Or I’m going to scream.” He nods, helping unfasten the buckled strap of leather that protects the veins in her lower arms during a hunt, and sets it between her jaws. He doesn’t like what it means that her own fingers were too uncoordinated to work the buckles.
“Ready?”
She nods, and he can practically hear her. As I’ll ever be.
He slides his arms under her, and she chokes back a shout of what’s probably a mixture of shock and pain as he lifts her, practically effortlessly.
Vampires can’t actually fly. But they can scale sheer walls.
He shoves the fire escape window open and maneuvers both of them out onto the landing. They’re on the third floor, and he can see that about half a floor down there’s just…nothing. Apparently, the metal on the fire escape was easier to make off with than the window bars.
“Okay, I’m going to try not to make this worse but I’m gonna need my hands,” he says, quietly. “Put your arms around my neck.”
She does, and he latches claws into the crumbling brick and begins climbing down.
He can hear Sierra hissing and gasping softly practically in his ear, and at one point muttering, “this sucks” around the leather in her mouth, but he can’t stop.
“Not much farther now, okay?” He says. He can see the medical team with their gurney, and a very distressed-looking Pete, below them.
She nods, her hair brushing against his chin with the movement.
True to his word, he’s laying her back on the gurney a minute later, and the medical team swarms her, pulling her away from him. He wants to follow, but he knows he’ll only be in the way.
A hand comes up close to his arm, and he startles slightly. Pete.
“They’re gonna take good care of her. They’re doing their best.” It sounds like he’s reassuring himself as much as he is Shay.
Shay just nods, watching the ambulance pull away screaming, and noticing the rear half of a silver car visible in what used to be a doorway. Damn, she wasn’t kidding.

...

“Stop.” Shay puts an arm across the doorway. “They took your stitches out. That is not permission to go crawling around the wreckage of a car that will probably make you need more of them.”
“I’ve got to put her back together too.” Sierra says.
“You will. Just wait a few more weeks.” Shay sighs. “She’s not going anywhere and neither are you.”
“Don’t remind me.”
She’s lucky it’s a six month unpaid suspension. Maira pulled the ‘extenuating circumstances’ card, insisting Sierra had killed Shay’s sire in a purely justifiable effort to prevent her from taking control of him again. Outside standard operating procedure on a distressing amount of levels, but something that, shockingly, the National Huntmaster’s Office was prepared to accept.
And it probably looks bad on the books to be the hunter agency that fired a Stoker.
“You’re just headed for the car to get out of the mandatory remedial policy course, aren’t you?”
Sierra grimaces. “Whoever picked the video narrator for that needs to be the one on suspension. He’s just droning on and on.”
“You could watch it with the speed turned up.” Shay gently steers her back toward the couch. “It’s a formality anyway. Maira knows you know the rules, you just chose not to follow them.”
“It’s a formality with pop quizzes. I hate those.”
They’ve fallen back into the usual pattern of playful banter. It’s nice to know that what that vamp (he still doesn’t know her name, they may never know it, her DNA didn’t match to anything in any records and they’re still working on dental, but given that they’ve had to try and contact Russian authorities for that, he isn’t sure how well that will go) did to their relationship wasn’t a permanent rift, but they haven’t talked about what happened that day since Sierra woke up in the infirmary.
He’s not about to bring it up. He wasn’t lying when he said what they have right now is just fine with him. If Sierra wants to talk about whatever it was she said when she thought she might be dying, that’s her choice.
She settles gingerly into the couch and picks up the laptop. “Alright, I guess I’ll finish this section. And then email Grandpa Stephen and tell him he needs to add about eight new apps to the ‘responding to vampires captured on social media’ subheading.”
Shay nods. “I’ll start dinner. I don’t think I can ruin prepackaged ramen.” They’re on a shoestring budget right now with Sierra’s suspension. Shay can handle the rent and utilities with what Emma pays her staff, but food has always been Sierra’s responsibility and she refused to let him pay for something he doesn’t need.
“You let the water boil off spaghetti once. You set off the smoke alarm.”
“It’s not my fault I haven’t needed to eat in years.”
“Just keep your eye on it.” She picks up her headphones. “After this, do you want to look at paint colors? If I’m going to rebuild half the front end I think it might be time for Dad’s Camaro to get a new look.”
“I’m game.” He glances at the printout on the coffee table. “Looks like you got started already.”
“I got really bored in the section on appropriate footwear, and Pete is still trying to convince me to use Excel tables for everything in my life.” There’s a list of paint colors, codes, and interior combinations for the ‘67 model year, with photos of cars with each of the described color combinations next to them.
“I was thinking of going with the Nantucket Blue. It would still look good with the interior and be light enough to not get too hot if we road trip it to Texas again.”
“How about this one?” Shay asks, pointing to a light tan. “Sierra Fawn. It literally has your name in it. That feels like it’s meant to be.”
“If I want a car that looks like the military owned it first, sure.” Sierra says. “It shades olive, see?”
“That might be a good color in the desert. Make it less visible.”
“We don’t work in the desert often enough.” Sierra says, then looks up and sniffs. “Go stir those noodles.”
“I see what you’re doing. I’m not done trying to convince you.”
“I’m not painting my car olive drab, Shane Barrett.”