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vengeancedemon · 2 months ago

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TIMING: a few hours after to the grave. LOCATION: worm row PARTIES: Eve ( @technowarden ) & emilio ( @vengeancedemon ) SUMMARY: eve is called to clean up a dead hunter. it’s not who, nor what, she expects. CONTENT WARNINGS: suicidal ideation tw, mentions of past sibling death

It had been as simple as a phone call waking her up out of a restless dream. Private number, a voice Eve has never heard, a call about a dead body in a dumpster behind a dive bar in the Wormhole. A dead hunter. As much as Eve wanted to ask more, she bit her tongue, and let the line go dead. People would only call if they thought there wouldn’t be consequences, so it didn’t matter who had called and who was dead. It had to not matter. Eve packed her bags and hurried out her front door. There were still a few hours before daylight. She even knew the dumpster in question - this wouldn’t be the first body she’d pulled out of there.

The wormhole was one of her most frequent places of business, and Eve wasn’t short of weapons or latex gloves as she hopped out of her car and walked to her destination, shining her flashlight down the alley. She spotted the pool of blood against a nearby wall first, then the pile of ash. An abandoned stake lay not much further away, also blood and ash stained. Vampires didn’t usually waste this much blood, except when that blood could also burn them. Not just a dead hunter, but a slayer. The knot in Eve’s throat tightened as her flashlight found the bloodstained dumpster, one limp leg hanging out of it. She didn’t know every hunter in town, sure, but she knew just a few that were that tall. She knew a couple that wore dark trousers crusty with old blood stains. She knew only one who had been falling apart the last time they spoke, who had been seeking death as much as the undead. Silently, Eve pulled out her phone, and began taking pictures of the scene, her camera flash made the blood glisten, caught every blood soaked fibre of the denim jeans.

It shouldn’t have been surprising. Slayers didn’t break the way Owen broke and keep going for long. Every hunter had a little bit of a death wish. It was their final release from a duty none of them chose. Owen had one more than most. Over the years, Eve had grown familiar with the ache of dealing with the bodies of hunters she knew well. This was no different, just because they tried to save him a few weeks before. The hardest part, she knew now, was the part where she saw their faces, eyes and mouths agape, skin drained of all warmth. The worst ones had always been the eyes that were her exact shade of blue. Eve had buried family; she could bury anyone. It just meant bracing for that first, unknowing look. Eve took a deep breath, shut away the thoughts of how Owen had looked at her in the barn, lifted the lid on the dumpster, and gasped.

The face staring back at her with clouded eyes wasn’t Owen Lundkvist at all. It was Emilio.

Emilio Cortez, who Eve had first met hiding in a closet, both wielding a knife as they exchanged clever words and clever looks. Emilio, whose first joke had been a message of a mop, asking if it was her. In her car, it had been Emilio, smiling about his new fiance as she went through the list of evidence they were looking for. In the police station evidence locker, watching the horrors of their lives unfold as etchasketch morality tales, both of them joking until there was nothing left to joke about. Emilio Cortez, begging her to show him something they both knew he couldn’t stand to look at. His eyes had looked at her with such horror, illuminated by the cold blue light of her laptop screen. Her list, his name on her list. Hundreds of people had died in San Augustin Etla, and he had been the one to demand she remember them. Another car ride, another break in, another list. A small joke shared over a near death experience, her fingers covered in his blood.

They said that your whole life flashed before your eyes right before you died. Eve didn’t know about that, but she saw the entirety of their relationship in the whites of Emilio’s eyes as her camera light flashed. And then she put those memories in a box, sealed the lid on tight, and turned a person into a to-do list item. Emilio Cortez wasn’t a friend, or someone who hated being near her, or a private investigator, or a Slayer anymore. He was a task she needed to complete. Her camera flashed: this time, there was nothing but death in his eyes.

Satisfied she’d documented the scene as much as would ever be necessary, Eve took Emilio’s arm and tried to move it. Stiff as wood. It was still warm. Not warm like a person was, but not as cold as the trash around him. Whoever had phoned her had found this body soon after Emilio had died. They may even have been the one to deliver the killing blow. Eve felt sick as her eyes drifted to the bloodied stain that started at his chest and ran down his front. At least it had been quick. Far from the worst death she’d seen a hunter die. She looked at the pool of blood inside the dumpster, far more than would leak out by gravity alone, and felt a sick twist in her stomach.

She lifted the corpse out of the dumpster and onto the ground. The body was folded in the form of the trash bags he had died upon. It would be easier if he was something closer to flat. Eve peeled a yoghurt lid out of his hair, and wiped down his face and hands from the grime of the trash. There would be more to do, later, when she knew what she was doing with his corpse. But the first box on her to do list was to get him flat enough to fit in her body bags - she needed to break rigor in some of his joints. Despite the term, it didn’t involve any kind of real breaking, just the gentle but firm movement of his joints until they stretched and the muscles gave way. As Eve worked, she ran the rest of her to do list through her mind. She needed to phone Teddy, to find out if their entanglement had become legal enough that the body had to make it to the town morgue. She needed to find Teddy’s number, before that. If someone needed to find the body, at least it wouldn’t need modifying - a stab was a perfectly mundane way to die. Maybe she would just plant some evidence, point the police down a perfectly human wild goose chase. Eve was pretty sure no cameras were in the area, but she’d have to check that too, or see if any of the windows nearby had opened for a curious pair of eyes or camera. Teddy would be responsible for their flat, but Emilio probably had weapons and evidence lying around Axis Investigations, so that would have to go too…

It was easier to think about what was next than think about what her hands were doing, but the next step demanded that she look. Before she could do anything else for him, she had to act to protect herself. There was blood in Emilio’s mouth, which was probably his, but she had to check before bringing his body anywhere. Check to see if the vampires had tried to pull one last cruel trick on him. Her recent Wight encounter has reminded Eve of the importance of not assuming a dead body would stay that way.

As she rolled up his sleeves to check for bites there, her gaze was caught by a tattoo written across his wrist. A simple word, just five letters, and it knocked the breath out of her. Eve stared at the letters, blinking hard as she tried to pull up her walls as a dam against the trickle of emotions that might become a flood if she didn’t bury them. The smallest stickfigure in a pool of etcha-sketch blood. The youngest name on her list, that Emilio had stared and talked about, without ever telling her this name. Eve and Emilio never spoke about Etla, but in the way that they were always talking about Etla. Even when they were talking about Etla, they were never talking about her. It always came back to these five letters, signifying four short years, even if she hadn’t known it until right now. Eve hoped that his version of an afterlife granted him one with her.

No new bites anywhere to be seen. One small mercy, in the midst of all this. If he was a ghost, he probably would not even linger. She hoped he wasn’t now - no one wanted to see the reality of how a corpse was handled. Even in death, Emilio didn’t have the stomach for her work. Eve rolled up the sleeve, covered up Flora’s name and Emilio’s finally-finished grief, and ended her inspection.

Eve and Emilio were once again closer in death than they had been in life. How little of what she knew about him had been shared by choice. She hoped he'd forgive her as she unrolled the white plastic of a body bag and set it beside him, completely unzipped. She lifted his body gently, setting him into the bag. She lifted one leg to tuck into the plastic, then the other. She folded his arms down by his side. The only sound in this whole miserable town was the rustling of the bag as she began to pull up the zipper.

When the zip was pulled up to just by his neck, and the white plastic lay over him like a funeral shroud, Eve paused, and gently cupped the side of his face. Her face had been cupped like this a thousand times in her childhood, every time her siblings and parents ran out the door to respond to a new call, to chase a new opponent. It was to remind them that their hands were not just made for bloodshed, their lips were not just made for lies. That in the midst of the Phobids and Muses and Fauns, there was one feeling that would always ring true. It was a hunter’s goodbye, just in case they never saw each other again. She’d said it to Emilio a couple times now, a useful border to acknowledge the complexity between them, and to shield herself from, well, this. Eve found it about as useful now as she had for every other hunter she’d buried.

“Goodbye, Emilio Cortez. I’m glad you were here.” she murmured, but didn’t move her hand until his cheek felt deceptively warm. Eve took a breath, and closed the bag. She opened her phone and switched her leg’s mode to ‘Heavy Lifting’, and picked up the body easily. She slung it over her shoulder, walked the short alley to her car, and left it in there. Better not to feel his presence as she cleaned up the pools of blood left in the shape of the body on the floor and in the dumpster. As she worked, she hummed tunelessly. Music had always been her distraction, her way to lock the doors of her mind, so that she could wipe up blood without flinching. She was a music box, a dancer moving mindlessly through a routine she’d done a thousand times before.

The part that came after was harder. Once the blood was cleaned up and the alley made convincingly dirty once more, the mindless work ended, and she was once more dealing with the reality of Emilio’s body in her car. She paused, leaning her body against the cool bricks of a nearby wall, hunting down contact information for Teddy Jones. (She should have looked into this before now. She should have known Emilio’s plan. Should have been brave enough to ask, even knowing he’d hate being asked.)

“Hello, is this Teddy Jones? I’m Eve, I’m a friend of Emilio’s,” was how it began. By the time the call was done, Eve had been hollowed out. She stared at the wall opposite, and nothing at all, catching her breath from the effort of keeping her voice even. It was worse when the person you had to notify wasn’t also a hunter. But at least now she had a destination. And music, blasting through her earbuds loud enough to deafen the pain of Teddy’s words right out of her head.

Eve walked over to her van, feeling leaden, and pulled herself into the driver’s seat. She was halfway down her to-do list now. Once the corpse wasn’t her responsibility anymore, she could have a light rest.

—

When Emilio was twelve years old, his oldest brother had died. Victor had been eighteen at the time and, to the knobby-kneed twelve year old that looked up to him, that had seemed ancient. He’d thought of Victor as invincible, as infallible. And then, one day, his uncle went out on a hunt with his brother and came back alone. Emilio had never seen the body; later, when Lucio was drunk enough for his tongue to loosen, he’d admit that there wasn’t much of a body left to see. It wasn’t Emilio’s first experience with death, despite his young age, but it was the first that resonated. It was the first that felt real.

It wouldn’t be the last.

Death was a shadow cast over every aspect of his life. It swallowed the light from every room, cut through every attempt to drown it out. It was inescapable for everything and everyone, of course, but it always felt personal for Emilio. Death, for him, wasn’t an occasional unwanted guest arriving unexpectedly. It had a regular place setting at the dinner table. He always knew it was coming.

He’d known it would come for him sooner rather than later, too. The period of time he’d been afraid of it was shorter than the period of time where he hadn’t. For the first half of his life, he’d been made to think of it as an honor. Death was something he was meant to do, like his father had, like his brother. Dying for a cause made a man into a martyr, and wasn’t that a good thing to be? The fear had come later, with a writhing mass of dark hair and wide eyes sitting in his arms, with a woman he loved in his bed and a little girl curled between them in the blankets. He was only afraid of dying when he’d had something to live for. When he lost it, he’d gone back to setting the kitchen table. He’d gone back to waiting, to watching the door and wondering when his turn would come.

And he’d gotten things to live for again, of course. He had someone waiting for him at home, had people who would mourn when he stopped breathing. Teddy didn’t deserve to lose him; none of the friends he’d made in Wicked’s Rest did. But Emilio never could recapture that fear he’d held when his daughter blinked up at him from his arms. He could never quite make himself afraid of dying again, no matter how much he knew he ought to be. He still chased it, even when people he loved begged him not to. It was a selfish thing, he knew. A better man would have let it go.

But he’d never been a very good man.

Still… finding it had come almost as a surprise. Even as the knife had entered his chest, some part of him had been so sure it was survivable. It wasn’t until the world had faded that he’d realized it was the end. And it didn’t feel the way he thought it would; he figured it never did. He’d been expecting something grander, he guessed. Bright lights to walk into, confirmation of Heaven or Hell, something. Instead, there was only fading consciousness, muffled voices, and the faint sensation of his body being moved and stuffed somewhere cramped.

He let his mind wander, as the last of it faded. He let himself imagine Flora’s face, even if it was a hazy, blurry thing. He let himself hear Juliana’s voice calling out to him, offering a forgiveness he’d never quite earned. He let himself think of Victor, who’d been dead longer than he was alive, or of his sister Rosa, who’d probably died hating him. He let himself picture his brother Edgar, his mother offering him some semblance of pride that he’d never been awarded while either of them was alive. He let his mind conjure up the people he’d loved who’d met death at that table before he had, let himself think they’d welcome him.

It was a good lie.

The comfort wasn’t quite enough to drown out the anger, in those last moments, but nothing ever was. Emilio died the same way he’d lived — furious and vengeful, with hatred clinging to every inch of him.

He woke up the same way.

It was a slow awakening. He came to piece by piece, the order reversed from how he’d faded. Sound came rushing in first, muffled and far away. Music was playing, and someone was humming along. Both the song and the voice were familiar, but he couldn’t place either of them. The feeling came next — something touching all parts of him, closing him in somewhere small and sending him reeling into a panic. His fist shot out to one side, sloppy and weightless, with little real control behind the motion. His leg kicked out, pain shooting through it as it did so. His bad knee ached — was it because he was cramped up in this small space, or had he injured it again? Memory was hazy, too.

He blinked as his vision began returning, and something was wrong. It was dark, and it wasn’t supposed to be. Slayers were gifted with perfect night vision; Emilio had never experienced the dark without it. The closest frame of reference he had was being blindfolded, but this didn’t feel like that. It was a suffocating thing, the darkness around him. He could feel it closing in with the plastic he was wrapped in.

As the feeling returned to him, he began flailing out in earnest. His hands pushed in every direction in search of an exit, his legs kicking and jerking despite the pain each motion sent vibrating through his bad knee. His heart —

His heart wasn’t pounding. It wasn’t stuttering like a jackrabbit in his chest, wasn’t pumping blood and panic through his veins, wasn’t moving at all. His heart was still, even as the rest of him thrashed and flailed. Was this Hell, then? Was this what was left for him? An eternity stuffed in some small space, his aches and pains still with him even as his heart no longer beat. Emilio let out a low keen, sounding like something not-quite-human, like an animal stuck in a trap.

Distantly, he registered that he was moving, and then registered that movement stopping. He couldn’t hear the hum of the engine beneath him — the thing he was stuffed inside muffled outside noise a little too much — but logically, he knew he was probably in a vehicle. And since the last thing he remembered was someone sticking a knife in his chest, he wasn’t sure he wanted to be in whoever’s vehicle he was riding in.

It was a vampire who’d stabbed him (killed him? Was he dead?), but he didn’t feel the shiver down his spine that accompanied an undead presence as they approached. Was it the panic dulling the feeling? It didn’t matter. Whatever situation he was in now, he wanted out of it. He thrashed and lashed out as best he could, intent on carving out some kind of advantage for himself here, on getting out and then getting away. He could still salvage this, whatever it was. He still needed to salvage this. If it was Hell, he’d make it regret taking him in. He could at least do that.

—

The body moved. The body moved and Eve slammed on her brakes immediately, hard enough that her seatbelt was likely to leave mayflower bruises, gone by the end of tomorrow. The harness that she used to secure corpses held too, but the body within it kept struggling, fighting against the plastic bag. The voice that cried out was heartbreakingly familiar, but Eve could not afford to feel, could not do anything other than let instinct take over. Moving at a lightning speed, Eve unfastened her buckle with one hand and reaching for a stake in the other.

Whatever was in the back was not alive, and therefore, was hungry. The only advantage Eve would get was in this first moment of disorientation, like a babe screaming at an unfamiliar world. She twisted, pushing herself half out of her seat between the two backrests, so that she could reach the bag that Emilio was struggling in. Her right hand found his chest through the white plastic sheeting, giving her a guide for where to drive her left. She raised the stake and began to drive it down towards his heart.

The stake hit his chest and stopped. The wooden tip pressed into his chest, probably right at the entrance of his recent stab wound, but went no further. It took Eve’s mind a second to realise what her instincts had already clocked, to figure out why she had stopped. Something wasn’t right.

Even a fledgling, panicked by their rebirth, would have the strength to push back. Their flailing arms would have shredded the plastic of her bag. She’d put a hand on his chest to figure out where his sternum was, but that hand was enough to pin his body down without any effort.

The first instinct a hunter trained, before they even learned how to fight or protect themselves, was to protect a human. After all, they met human children before they met any monster. As toddlers, they were taught to reign in their strength, slow down their speeding hands and kicking feet. Careful, Evie, she could hear her mother say, they can’t play as rough as you. You don’t want to hurt them. Slow down, play gentle.

The weakness beneath her hands felt human. It had been enough to give Eve pause, her breathing ragged, as he continued to flail, his limbs encased by nothing more than plastic. But he couldn’t be. Fae weren’t gifted with strength either, but they didn’t rise from the dead. Eve pulled herself through the rest of the gap as quickly as she could, straddling his hips, using her knee to pin down one arm and one hand to catch the other. Her stake punched a hole through the plastic right by his throat, a hole that she tore open to expose his face.

It didn’t matter who he was, or who he had been. Seeing Emilio’s face looking back at her did little to pause the resolve in her eyes. There was a good chance he was in there, wholly, as the person she had grieved just twenty minutes ago. It didn’t matter. It couldn’t. No matter the person they were behind their bloodlust, a vampire out of control was a danger to any human nearby. But Emilio wasn’t out of control, he was completely within her control. It was enough to wait a moment, to learn more of what fae trickery this might be… and to rapidly swap her stake for a knife built for cutting through necks. (It was Daiyu’s favourite rule, after all. There wasn’t much that survived decapitation.)

—--

Pressure against his chest, hard and sharp, made him hesitate. He couldn’t see anything, couldn’t tell what it was. The plastic entrapping him made a poor barrier between his chest and this new intrusion; he knew it wouldn’t hold up if more pressure was applied. Was it a knife? Maybe this was Hell. Maybe Hell forced you to relive a version of your death time and time again. Maybe the same vampire who had pushed that knife into his chest was poised to repeat the motion. Would everything fade the way it had the first time?

(Maybe he’d get those last few moments of peace repeated, be allowed to tell himself pretty lies when the sound ebbed out. Hell wouldn’t be so bad if that was part of it, would it? Hell could be made manageable. It was a funny thought.)

He continued to thrash as a hand held him down, panic setting in once more. (Had it ever left him?) His arms were pinned down, and there was a weight trapping his legs. Whoever this was must have been strong, because Emilio couldn’t buck them off. And — and the plastic trapping him must have been strong, too. Something supernatural? It would explain how the dark was able to creep in, wouldn’t it?

Something penetrated the barrier, but it didn’t find his skin. Instead, it tore a hole through the plastic encasing him, one that was widened with a careful hand. If he’d been more present, he would have turned his head and snapped the fingers off with his teeth. As it was, he was too panicked to do much of anything. It was a pitiful display, the kind of thing his mother would have been ashamed of. He was ashamed of it, of the hungry way with which he greeted the light. His head was freed, the dim night came to greet him, and he gasped as his lungs gulped in air that he hadn’t realized he couldn’t properly get inside the bag.

(How long had he been without oxygen? How long did it take a person to suffocate? Was he dying, or was he dead already? What was happening? What was happening? What was happening?)

He blinked, shaking his head as his eyes darted wildly around. He was inside a vehicle. He was in some kind of bag. There were straps keeping him from rolling, and a body on top of him keeping him from moving. And the body — the body was Eve, who was swapping a wooden stake for a sharpened knife.

It was funny — his first thought, upon seeing this, was to wonder if it was his stake she was using, or if she had one of her own. His second thought was to wonder how he’d pissed her off this badly. And his third thought, the one that he decided to stick with, was that he wanted her off of him.

“Get the fuck off me,” he snarled, bucking again to try to throw her. She must have had a reason for it, because Eve rarely did anything without reason, but Emilio couldn’t focus on that. All Emilio could focus on was the tight confines around his body, and the way his heart was still not pounding as it should have been. “What — What the fuck is happening? Why am I — Get off, Eve, I need to — Get me out of this fucking —” He struggled against her grip, but it felt like fighting iron restraints. Had she always been so strong? She was a hunter, same as him. Shouldn’t their strength be proportional to one another? “What is this?”

—

He gasped for air like he needed it, and Eve wondered if that was just because he was in the habit of needing it, or if he had never been dead at all. If he had never been Emilio at all. She watched, knife hovering over him, as he looked around panickedly. Terrified. What a hellish way to go this was becoming. Apologies pressed against the inside of her pursed lips, the desire to let him go bubbling up in her. But held like this, she was safe. He could not bite, he could not hurt her. Hurting him was a small price to pay. Hunting was full of finding the lesser price to pay.

They weren’t supposed to hunt each other. How many months had passed since she last saw Owen? How many weeks since she’d last aimed a weapon at a person she could admit in the privacy of her own heart that she liked? The more he looked around, the less this felt like a trap, which was always when you needed to be most on your guard. His eyes finally, finally focused on her face, for the first time recognising her. Eve inhaled sharply as he snarled at her. But didn’t move. He could see her, he could recognise her, he could even name her as he pleaded for her to give him space.

“No.” Eve pressed her knee down harder, tightened her grip, just to prove her point. She wasn’t letting go any more than she was letting him get to her. It wasn’t a lapse she could afford, even if her chest ached worse now than it had before. Did Emilio recognise the same look in her eyes now as she’d had aiming that rifle at Owen? It didn’t matter. It didn’t matter. “I would stop struggling, if I was you. I’m not in the mood for fucking around and finding out. We would just skip straight to finding out.” The knife in her hand felt heavy. She kept it hovering an inch over his throat anyway.

The hand pinning down one of his arms in the plastic let go (it wasn’t like the plastic wasn’t restraint enough, only to quickly slide beneath his jaw, resting on his neck. It was still cooler than body temperature, and no matter where she touched, she couldn’t find a pulse. “I checked you for bites. I checked. There was no magic out there either. How the hell are you undead?”

—

He was looking at her now, finally. The world was still a topsy-turvy thing, nothing making sense the way it should have, but the biggest threat was almost certainly the one holding a knife to his throat, so he kept his eyes locked onto her face. The expression she wore was a familiar one, and it was a little funny to think that the last time he’d seen it, he’d also just been stabbed. Back then, it was Owen’s knife, was a blow he’d redirected from something fatal to something survivable in a way he hadn’t been able to do with the vampires holding him down… was it hours ago now? Days, weeks, months? Had he been wrapped in that plastic for years, suffocating or decaying? Eve was looking at him now the same way she’d looked at Owen then, her eyes burning with a determination she’d claim was emotionless. It had taken him a while to figure out that that wasn’t true.

Eve was good at hiding what she thought, what she felt. She had a lot of masks, and she slipped each one over her features in a way that seemed effortless. Emilio still didn’t know what the truest parts of her looked like, still couldn’t pick her real face out of a crowd, but he still knew a mask when he saw one. The neutrality with which she’d approached Owen in the barn had been feigned. So was the one she wore for him now. She felt, even if she pretended not to.

But feeling would not keep her from doing what she felt was necessary here. And the knife that kissed the skin of his throat and the weight still holding him in place made no secret of what she thought this situation necessitated.

Rage burned in his chest anyway, the flames of it touching every part of him as she refused, and it felt so much hotter than normal. It was a physical thing burning through him; he swore he could smell the smoke of it. His eyes bore into hers, rage written so clearly on his features. He wondered if that made him more familiar. Eve had seen him angry far more often than she’d seen him at ease.

The weight pinning him increased with her refusal to move, her hand letting go of his arm to touch his neck. He still couldn’t move, was still trapped by the plastic as she looked him over. The rage still burned, igniting all the more when she asked a question he suspected to be rhetorical. How the hell are you undead?

It seemed to echo in the small space, seemed to cling to the metal walls of the van. It burned through him, and a strange pressure at the tips of his fingers was the only preamble to the plastic pinning him down tearing as his hands thrashed against it. Something sharp assisted him, but what? He had knives on him — he always had knives on him — but he hadn’t been able to reach for any. In any case, he took advantage of the quick burst of strength the rage ignited, bucked again to try to knock her off balance. He needed the knife away from his throat, no matter who was holding it. He needed to be able to think.

“I’m not!” He snapped, and it came out garbled. “I’m not — What the fuck are you — That isn’t —” His mind moved a mile a minute as he tried to put the pieces together. He couldn’t be a vampire; his blood was acidic to them, there was no way they could consume enough to turn him. And the cross he still wore around his throat hung in its usual place, no pain where it rested. A zombie? No… his leg still ached, the stab wound in his chest hadn’t healed. Not a mare, either; he hadn’t slept in days, so how could one have found him? “I’m not, I’m — I’m —-”

Shit.

The possibility loomed over him. A rarer thing; a less simple answer. Furies were something he’d been taught to kill, because slayers needed to know that sort of thing. But unlike other undead, he’d been advised never to seek them out. Last resort, his uncle told him once. You can cut off its head, but it’s probably going to take you with it. You avoid them if you can, Milio. Last resort. He knew only the basics of how they came to be, knew they needed rage and violence and — and vengeance.

Shit. It was a thought he figured bore repeating.

—

Eve could worry about the hatred in his eyes later. He bucked against her again, and this time Eve needed to put down a hand to steady herself. He was getting stronger by the minute. This was what zombies did, right? Except they began overwhelmingly strong, and this was the opposite. Her mask fractured for a second with real worry. The outcome was the same, and in letting her first instinct win, in leaning in for a fight rather than bolting out of her car, she’d made whatever came next inevitable. If he kept gaining strength, she had seconds to make her choice, rather than minutes. The plastic around his hands had torn, but she couldn’t look away from his face.

“Emilio,” she warned. Her question hadn’t been rhetorical; she searched his eyes for an answer even as he searched his own mind. She saw the moment he found his answer, the fury on his face slipping into something much more complex. Something much more awful. Whatever Emilio had found in his slayer’s archive, he did not like the answer. He didn’t feel the need to share it with her either. Eve groaned, wanted to shake him, throttle him, remind him of how hard she’d worked just weeks ago to keep him alive. How Eve had accepted that her effort with Owen was wasted, how she wasn’t ready to accept that with Emilio again, twice in one hour.

She’d mourned. It didn’t matter now, not with the way he looked at her. She grit her teeth together, turning her hand to iron as she touched his neck again. Nothing, no pulse, no burn, nothing. Eve shook off the iron as she shifted the knife in her hand, giving herself the space to reach over to a toolbox in the other seat, the knife never wavering from his throat as her fingers wrapped around a small iron device. She didn’t have many to spare, and this was one of her better ones, gifted from her father when she’d been young.

Dispellates normally worked by being thrown to the ground and letting the smoke hiss out. Eve crushed it in her hand instead, the metal cutting her palm as smoke poured out of her fist. It changed nothing. It was still Emilio beneath her, still glaring up at her, his pulse still dead. If this was a trick, it wasn’t a fae one. “Fuck,” Eve muttered, flinging the dispellate into the corner. She’d need to open the window later. If there was a later. “Fuck!”

Shouldn’t slayers be immune to this sort of thing? Not every warden had iron skin or the speed the Farrans built their reputation on, but fae were wildly variable, and it was impossible to become them. Surely all slayers should get the one luxury of being guaranteed to stay dead when their shift finally came to an end? Eve’s stomach lurched with it. “I need you to give me something, Emilio. I don’t-” Eve took a deep breath, straining to regain the composure her voice had had moments ago, “I don’t want to hurt you, I can’t imagine what you’re feeling right now, but I need you to give me something, anything, here.”

—

Distantly, he was aware of her running through a list of her own. Emilio had conducted his silent tests with the necklace, with the strength, with the reminder of his lack of sleep, had ruled out one thing after another. And now, it was Eve’s turn to do hers. He didn’t know what she was looking for exactly. He guessed that whatever she had in her hand was iron, but he didn’t know what result she expected. He knew less about fae than he did undead. Maybe part of him hoped, in some strange way, that her test would prove him wrong. Maybe part of him wanted the iron to burn, wanted it to show that his hypothesis wasn’t true.

(Maybe he just wanted Eve to get it over with, just a little. He wondered if she’d saw through his throat with her blade, if he let her. Then he remembered his uncle’s warning, and he wondered if he would let her. Was he the sort of man who would let someone he liked die if it meant he got a permanent end, too?

He was too afraid to let himself answer the question.)

Whatever tests she performed, it was clear by the look on her face that the answer wasn’t something simple enough to lead her to a solution. She cursed, she tossed her supply to the side, she kept the blade at his throat and kept her weight on his body. He felt stronger the more the rage seeped through him, but he knew he wasn’t strong enough. If she were a normal human, if she weren’t a hunter, if she weren’t trained for things like this, he probably could have tossed her off. But he couldn’t figure out if he wanted to. He couldn’t figure out how far he was willing to let this go.

She pleaded with him and, for a moment, she sounded almost human. It was a jarring thing, coming from Eve. She was usually so poised, so unflappable. Emilio had tried to make her waver in the past. When they talked about Etla, when he was angry and hurting and desperate to make someone else feel just as strongly as he did and she was the only one in the room. He’d lashed out at her then, had tried to tear her apart just so that he wouldn’t be the only one bleeding, and it hadn’t worked. But now, in the small space of the van with only one heart beating, she looked rattled. More than she had in the barn; more than she had in the police station. It was strange to think that this was what it took.

“Give you what?” He snapped, rage pouring out of him. “Go ahead, Eve. Stick the knife in my throat. You can’t hurt me, can you? Can’t kill a corpse.” His nostrils flared, his eyes burned. She couldn’t imagine what he was feeling, but neither could he.

His arm, freed from the plastic but still hard to move in this position, shot up to grip her wrist. The claws at the ends of his fingers were unimpressive things. He wished he knew more about what he was now. Did they grow with age, or with something else? Did he want them sharper? His hand held her wrist, but the grip wasn’t crushing, wasn’t even tight. He couldn’t tell if his next move would be to press the knife further into his own throat, or to pull it away. In the end, he settled for neither. Her pulse thrummed against his palm, a reminder that his own heart was still, and he dropped his hand as if her warm skin burned him. He closed his eyes, taking a deep breath that he didn’t need to draw, filling his dead lungs with oxygen that wasn’t necessary.

He’d been wrong — this wasn’t Hell. This was so much worse than that.

“If you cut off my head,” he said numbly, “we’re both going to die.” (Notably, this was not a request for her to remove the knife. Achingly, part of him hoped she’d ignore the warning.)

#technowarden #eve: rotten work #wickedswriting #s1 writing

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