Archive of Our Own

“Harder,” Erik instructs.

Raven pauses and takes a deep breath, and then she rotates 180 degrees and squarely kicks the pad Erik’s holding in front of his torso. He grunts and doubles over slightly, but when he straightens, he’s got that unhinged smile he does sometimes, the one with way too many teeth.

“Harder,” he repeats in a similarly unhinged tone.

Raven gives him a skeptical look, but she recenters again before she spins and kicks him so firmly that he stumbles, nearly falling before he manages to catch himself.

“You’re holding back,” he wheezes.

Raven puts her hands on her hips. “Sorry if I don’t want to actually maim you.”

“You can’t maim me,” Erik says, a hint of the unhinged smile returning. “I’m a vampire.”

“Uh, pretty sure maiming vampires is my literal job,” Raven says. “I mean, if I only maim them, that’s actually a better outcome for—”

“Harder,” he says again. “Imagine I’m a vampire you actually want to maim.”

It’s true that she doesn’t want to maim them most of the time—at this point, it’s just kind of what she does. In the early days, she had a lot of enthusiasm for her work, but three years into slaying, it’s pretty hard to get emotionally invested in staking random vampires every single night.

But if she pretends he’s not a random vampire… Her mind involuntarily calls up Sebastian Shaw’s ugly old face, his bony fingers curling over Charles’s shoulders as he leans in close from behind. She tries to stop the memory there, but of course it keeps going, in full technicolor: Shaw tilting his head, fangs drawn, as Charles locks eyes with her. Charles, her Watcher and the closest thing she ever had to a father, always so calm and in control until that exact moment, when she sees the pleading fear written across his face—

She swings around and kicks with all her might. Erik literally flies across the room, landing hard on his back.

“God, Erik, I’m sorry!” she cries as she hurries to where he landed. “Are you OK?”

Erik’s eyes are closed as he bites out, “Guess you thought of a vampire you really hate.”

Raven gives him a sardonic look that he can’t even see. She moves to grab his hands and haul him upwards, but he lets out a pained noise and says, “Just give me a minute. Go…drink some water or something.”

She rolls her eyes. “Yes, coach.”

They’ve been training for hours, but Raven isn’t even close to tired yet; she takes the stairs up to the ground floor two at a time, following the scent of something cooking in the kitchen.

As usual, Alex is on chef duty, and he turns from the stove and gives her an ironic salute before returning to stirring. It smells ridiculously good, but as Raven peers over his shoulder, her nose wrinkles.

“Garlic? Isn’t that a little insensitive?”

Alex gives her a look. “He’s not going to eat it!”

Raven doesn’t even know if the garlic thing is real. Stakes, crosses, sunlight, holy water: she has more hard evidence than a person would ever need about what actually gets the job done. They’ve found some random old folk methods to ward off vampires over the years that Erik has solemnly nodded about—even grimaced about!—only to learn later that he’d been fucking with them, and they were total nonsense.

As far as flavors of vampire go, Erik’s natural state seems to be two parts brooding and one part troll. Most days, Raven can’t believe she ever had a crush on him.

She’s sitting at the table with a very tall glass of water when Sean walks into the kitchen and announces, “Guess who sent another letter.”

He drops an annoyingly familiar-looking envelope onto the table in front of her—that’s already been opened.

“Is there a reason you’re reading mail addressed to me?” she says, glaring at him.

He holds up his hands in surrender. “Pretty sure we all know what it’s gonna say.”

“Lucky number seven,” Alex says without turning around.

Raven sighs and pulls the letter out of the envelope. The paper is just as thick as always. Maybe if they stopped buying such expensive stationery, they would be able to afford a computer.

“I really thought they’d have given up by now,” Erik says mildly as he strides into the kitchen.

Raven suddenly decides that she doesn’t even want to read it. Erik sits down across from her, so she shoves it towards him and says, “Maybe we should tell them we moved, but sadly there’s no forwarding address.”

Erik’s lips twitch as he picks up the letter, scanning the words that Raven can easily guess: a new Watcher is en route, some man with an improbably British-sounding name like “Cecil,” and oh, by the way, did you know that it’s vitally important a Slayer continues to have a Watcher? Someone who can train and mentor and guide you, even if you obviously don’t need to be guided anymore, a steady presence in this unpredictable, dangerous job—

“Interesting. They finally acknowledged your track record in this one,” Erik says, sounding like he’s trying not to laugh. “What’s that expression about the definition of insanity?”

“Sending a seventh Watcher in a single calendar year,” Alex calls over his shoulder.

“I didn’t make them all quit,” Raven protests.

“One of them didn’t quit,” Sean points out, looking up from his giant bag of Cheetos. “He died.”

Cecil Number Four had been on the job for literally a week. Raven called him by his actual name at the time, but in retrospect, they’ve all been Cecils.

Before she can defend herself, Alex glances at Sean and says, “Dude. You’ll spoil your appetite.”

Sean rolls his eyes and folds up the Cheetos bag. “Sorry, mom.”

“I don’t need another Watcher,” Raven moans, slouching in her seat and folding her arms across her chest. “I have Erik.”

Erik glances up quickly. “I’m not your Watcher.”

“You train with me every day,” Raven says. “What’s the difference?”

“I’m a vampire,” Erik says flatly.

“You used to be a Watcher,” Raven shoots back, even though she’s extremely aware that “being a Watcher” was also the reason Erik died and became a vampire.

And maybe that’s why Erik’s expression gets stormier as he repeats, “I’m a vampire.” He nods in the direction of her glass. “Drink your water.”

Raven rolls her eyes and picks up the glass, chugging as much as she can in a single gulp. She’s aware that she’s being childish, but the whole situation is just so stupid. All of these replacement Watchers have been totally useless—a metaphorical and literal drag on her slaying. Not like—

The front door slams, and a few moments later, Darwin hurries into the kitchen and says, “Guys, you would not believe what I just heard. I was going to call on the drive home, but it kind of felt like news I needed to deliver in person.”

“News?” Raven repeats.

“Were you down in the city?” Hank says absently as he walks into the kitchen. He brings a musty chemical smell with him, probably from whatever experiments he’s been doing this afternoon. It does not pair well with the scent of garlic.

“No—Sleepy Hollow,” Darwin tells him. “I was picking up some supplies at the magic shop and I stopped in at Ichabod’s for a drink.”

Not for the first time, Raven wonders if they should all move to Sleepy Hollow—sure, this house may be both comically large and comically warded, but the center of supernatural activity on the East Coast is clear across Westchester County. They could save a lot of time on the commute.

But then she realizes Darwin is still talking, something about running into a demon he knows at the bar. He pauses for a moment to glance at Erik for some reason before he looks back at the rest of them.

“He swore he wasn’t imagining it,” Darwin continues. “But…he saw Charles last week.”

Raven’s heart clenches, and she rises involuntarily out of her seat. “Charles is alive?”

“No,” Darwin says, shaking his head. “He’s not.”

*

Sometimes Erik thinks it was his own fault, really, for getting so damn comfortable.

It’s not that he’d exactly intended to play house with Charles for the better part of two years—a house that also included a werewolf, a warlock, a banshee, a half-demon, and, of course, the Slayer herself. But he had, in fact, sought Charles out, hoping that, despite his better judgment, Charles might ask him to stick around in some capacity.

He obviously didn’t know then that Charles had been cursed: bound to his own house, on condition that Raven pass the exercise in sadism the Watchers Council called a Cruciamentum. Erik had been happy to join in her training; he liked this Slayer, and he liked the idea of Charles being able to leave his own property even more. Perhaps if he hadn’t helped, Charles would have stayed safe, albeit…trapped. But then again, Raven would have been dead, which might have thrown a wrench in their relationship.

No—he has to cast back earlier to figure out where it all went wrong. Seeking out Charles obviously put a target on his back, but really, the seeds were already planted: Erik had gone and gotten his soul restored, not an experience he’d recommend no matter how much you’re pining after your ex.

Going down that road, though, leads him back even earlier. Charles wouldn’t have given him six years of silent treatment if Erik hadn’t killed that deranged Slayer—if he’s revising past decisions, that has to be up there. But he only had to kill her because she was trying to kill Charles; all of this could have been avoided if they hadn’t gotten caught that night.

Back and back and back: if he hadn’t kissed Charles, if he hadn’t desired Charles, if he hadn’t wanted to make Charles fall apart beneath his hands, Charles’s pulse hotly electric, his perfect red lips parting in surprise as Erik nosed against his neck. If only he’d watched Charles set that vampire on fire with a goddamn lighter that very first evening and turned on his heel and walked away forever.

In his darkest moments—when he’s sitting in Charles’s bedroom, watching the first hint of dawn peek through the curtains and considering yanking them wide open—he thinks that if he’d never met Charles in the first place, Charles would be alive today.

But then he shakes some sense into himself—none of that is even worth contemplating. The actual problem was that he failed to kill Sebastian fucking Shaw when he’d had the chance.

“What do you mean, he’s not,” Raven repeats, her voice dangerously low.

An awkward silence settles over the room—even though Erik can tell they all know exactly what Darwin means, Raven included.

“He’s a vampire now,” Erik says, forcing the words out before they can curdle on his tongue.

The awkward silence returns, until Sean says with more than a little forced cheer, “I guess that’s better than being dead, huh?”

“Debatable,” Erik mutters.

“He is dead,” Raven snaps. “It’s just some random demon walking around in his body—”

“It’s not—” Erik cuts in, and she turns and levels him with an icy glare. He only shrugs as he finishes, “It’s more complicated than that.”

“Oh, I’m sorry!” Raven says sarcastically. “Am I not capturing the nuances of vampirism?”

Hank clears his throat. “It actually is somewhat—”

“Is he the same old Charles, just a little colder?” Raven continues, totally ignoring him. “He was already deathly pale, you probably won’t even be able to tell the difference.”

Erik sighs. “Raven—”

Her icy glare somehow becomes even icier. “Yeah, I bet you’re just loving this.” Her voice turns mocking. “Hey Darwin, did your demon friend tell you where Erik can find Charles now? Maybe the two of them can go on dates at three in the morning, share a couple of blood—”

“You actually think I wanted this?” Erik hisses, out of his chair in an instant, index finger outstretched. He pokes Raven’s chest for emphasis. “This is the last fucking thing I wanted.”

But even as he says it, he knows it’s a lie. It’s the last fucking thing Charles wanted.

Raven slaps his finger away, hard. Maybe she can tell he’s lying—or maybe she’s reconsidering whether he should remain the solitary exception to her “kill all vampires” rule. If she could murder people with her mind alone, Erik is pretty sure he’d be a pile of ash right now.

“But did your demon friend say where to find Charles now?” Hank says in a small voice.

If Erik has been competing with Raven for “who’s taking Charles’s abduction and presumed death the hardest,” Hank comes in at a clear but distant third. The boy worshipped Charles. Over the past few months, Hank has tried his best to fill Charles’s role of dusty-tome scourer, but it’s pretty obvious that he’d rather be in his mad-scientist lab 24/7 (save the full moons, of course). He doesn’t even seem to enjoy maintaining Charles’s occult spreadsheets, which surprised Erik, because he assumed all nerds loved spreadsheets.

“He was in the city,” Darwin tells him. “Meatpacking District.”

Erik rolls his eyes. “How original.”

But Raven is all business now, clapping her hands together and saying, “So who’s driving me?”

Erik bites back his usual commentary about how Raven is eighteen years old and also humanity’s most important defense against vampires, demons, and other creatures of the night—emphasis on night—so isn’t it about time she got comfortable driving on the West Side Highway after dark? But he can already see her mentally cataloguing the weapons she’s going to bring to Manhattan.

“That’s it, then?” he snaps. “You learn that Charles isn’t dead—”

“He is dead,” Raven cuts in, her voice acidic.

“You learn that Charles is undead and your first thought is, ‘Let’s make sure he’s dead for real.’”

“I just…” She suddenly seems to deflate, looking far younger than she is. “…want to see him.”

Erik stares at her for a long moment. He wishes he had Charles’s gift for mind-reading. Eventually, he says, “I can drive.”

“I’m coming, too,” Alex says.

“I’ll join,” Darwin offers.

Both Hank and Sean look put out, so Erik sighs and says, “We can take the van.” He gestures to the stove, where Alex is still standing. “Eat your garlic soup and then we can go.”

“There are a lot of other ingredients!” Alex protests.

Erik crosses to the refrigerator and pulls out a bag of blood. It would be far better warmed up, but he doesn’t really want to be around other people right now.

He wanders the halls half-dazed until he winds up, unsurprisingly, in Charles’s bedroom. He flops back onto the bed, laying spread-eagled and staring up at the ceiling as he sips his cold blood directly from the bag. He can hear an imaginary Charles tsking and telling him not to spill any on the duvet.

It is, importantly, an imaginary human Charles: squishy and fragile, regularly felled by banal maladies like hay fever and indigestion, prone to yawning in the wee hours of the morning (delivered with a sniffy, “You know I can’t be wholly nocturnal, Erik”). Human Charles was always so warm—granted, Erik hadn’t been in such intimate contact with any other living person since he became un-living himself, but he really did think Charles ran warmer than most.

He actually often enjoyed those wee hours when Charles would finally drift off. Sometimes he tried to watch Charles breathing while he was awake, but Charles would invariably deem that “creepy.” There was no one to stop him watching the steady rise and fall of Charles’s chest when Charles was out cold.

Cold—in an instant, all memories of a warm and breathing Charles fly out the window. Charles isn’t warm anymore. Charles isn’t breathing anymore. Charles is a vampire now. The thought enters a loop in his head, punctuated every fourth rotation with a need to kill Sebastian fucking Shaw for good measure.

Far too comfortable, he thinks again—he’s literally too comfortable right now, sucking the last drops of blood from the bag on Charles’s obscenely large bed. He should have spent the past two years sleeping in a coffin; instead, he was laying on Charles’s 1,000-thread-count sheets.

Maybe that’s what lulled him into a false sense of security, and managed to override all the instincts he’d honed over the years. He’d assumed that once Raven passed her Cruciamentum and Charles’s curse ended, they could finally live a normal life—“normal” for a Watcher and a vampire with a soul, which isn’t saying much, but at least they could leave the house together from time to time. Erik had imagined… Well, it’s not worth lingering on what he’d imagined.

Because shortly after Charles’s house-arrest spell was lifted, he and Charles had been on a patrol with Raven when Sebastian fucking Shaw had appeared out of nowhere. Not nowhere, of course: as Erik briefly glanced at Azazel, the demon had offered up an eloquent shrug as if to say, Nothing personal. When he looked back at Charles, his eyes were wide and his body rigid with fear; Shaw was holding him from behind, clutching him close.

For one long moment, nobody moved. Shaw smiled, his fangs glinting in the dull lamplight, and then he gently tilted Charles’s head to the side, exposing the long, pale column of his neck. Erik’s blood, cold as it was, boiled.

But before he or Raven could take a step forward, Shaw removed a hand from Charles’s neck and held it out in a beckoning gesture—for Azazel to touch. And in an instant, Charles was gone.

*

“Whatever you try, please don’t turn me,” Charles had told him.

Erik remembers his jolt of surprise at the words, because he had, in fact, been thinking about turning Charles at the time. Of course, that would have been an alternative to killing him outright; early in their acquaintance, he’d been deeply torn between his desire to drain Charles and his desire to do everything else with Charles.

He’d never really been one for turning people. Some vampires clearly got off on it, like the breeding fetishists among their living counterparts. Being excited that you swapped blood with hundreds of victims always felt a bit cheap to Erik; vampirism might be a curse, but it was a pretty serious curse, and these people were giving it away left and right for a few more notches in their belts.

That’s not to say he’d been a total abstainer over the years: he’d turned a handful of people, some for strategic reasons, some more personal. And sure, he’d felt some kind of connection to them, but nothing particularly possessive, or paternal; one of the worst things about Shaw was he really seemed to buy into all that “sire and childe” nonsense.

OK, maybe not “one of the worst things,” Erik had to concede, given all the other things. But definitely in the top ten.

Turning Charles had been an idle thought, one of many bad ideas that had rattled through his lust-addled brain. But when Charles was kidnapped shortly afterwards—and Erik eventually found him trapped in a sort of deranged tea party with Azazel and Shaw—he’d been convinced that Shaw’s ultimate goal was making Charles a vampire himself.

“It is quite the exhilarating experience, I’ll have you know,” Shaw was telling Charles as he stroked his hand. “The world becomes so clear. You will understand everything so much better.”

Erik hadn’t seen any other way to interpret that—but when he ordered Shaw not to turn Charles, Shaw had the audacity to look offended as he said, “Turn him? Erik, my dear. I wouldn’t dream of it!”

He’s thought back to that moment again and again over the years—because of what Shaw said next: “I’m not going to turn him, when clearly you plan to. I’m not quite so ill-mannered as to encroach on your territory.”

Shaw had rambled on after that, chastising him for Charles’s relative youth and talking about how turning a teenager was ill-advised. But the entire time, he continued to act like Erik turning Charles was an inevitability. “Do wait until he matures into someone interesting, if you can bear the wait,” Shaw had instructed. “If not, well, we will prevail, I’m sure.”

Erik had thought nineteen-year-old Charles was plenty interesting, but he knew Shaw was right in one regard: there were very good reasons not to turn a teenager, even one who dressed like he was eighty. Whether Charles would be worth turning in five or ten years’ time seemed beside the point; Erik wanted Charles at that exact moment, and once they were free of Shaw’s clutches, that was really all that mattered.

And then there was the unfortunate business with the Slayer—when Charles had looked up at him, tears in his eyes, and said, “Leave, Erik. Leave and never come back, because I swear I will shoot you on sight, if I see you again,” and boy, there was another set of words that wound up emblazoned in his mind for years. By the time they were finally reunited, Charles was certainly old enough to be turned, but Erik had gone and gotten his soul restored in the interim. However cold and calculating he thought he’d been when he was alive, after several decades of vampirism, he’d underestimated the ease with which those sorts of thoughts came to him when he lacked a soul. Now, the idea of killing Charles and cursing him to an eternal undead existence actually made Erik feel…kind of bad.

But as the months passed, he realized there were other reasons to keep the idea of turning Charles in the back of his mind. Chief among them was the fact that Charles was obviously older than when they first met—and, like all humans, he was bound to continue in that direction.

It wasn’t any of that eternal youth nonsense. There’d been something coltish about nineteen-year-old Charles, a boy on the cusp of manhood; now, he was clearly a man, albeit a somewhat boyish-looking one, solid and strong after all his training with Raven, with broad shoulders and thick thighs. (The latter were some of the warmest parts of his over-warm body—an astounding sensation when Charles straddled basically any part of him.) Erik was a big fan of these developments, and he felt certain that he’d be an equally big fan of thirty-something Charles, and fifty-something Charles, and seventy-something Charles.

Never mind that he was somehow contemplating a life with Charles in half-century spans—the more worrying fact was that Charles’s time was finite. Sure, Erik could trip and land on one of Raven’s stakes any night of the week, but if he could manage to look where he was going, he would live forever. Charles, on the other hand…

He didn’t think Charles was always eavesdropping on his thoughts, but sometimes he’d make comments that suggested he heard a lot more than he let on. So Erik kept his turning thoughts locked tight in the back of his mind, only letting them loose in those wee hours of the morning, while he was watching the rise and fall of Charles’s chest as he slept. Sometimes, his gaze would drift up to Charles’s pale, perfect neck, and he’d hear Shaw’s words again.

But sometimes, he’d remember the first—and last—time he discussed turning with Charles himself. “Whatever you try, please don’t turn me,” Charles had told him—but that wasn’t all.

“I’m concerned about being turned, because my research indicates that psychic powers contribute to insanity and intelligence tends to translate into cruelty, when it’s not kept in check by empathy,” Charles had continued. “I am very empathic and still I manage to hurt people’s feelings when it really suits me. I think I would be a terrible vampire, and I mean that as in Vlad the Impaler terrible.”

Erik had cracked a joke, but years later, Charles’s words haunted him as much as Shaw’s. When you turned someone, there was no telling who would wake up undead—not with any real predictability, anyway. But somehow, deep down, Erik just knew: if he were to turn Charles, Charles’s worries about the vampire he’d wind up as would surely come true.

*

It’s not that Raven can’t drive—she’s had her license for more than a year now, thank you very much. Darwin was the one who wound up teaching her: Charles was cursed to stay on his own property, and it was way easier to learn during the day, so Erik was out, too. (The other three obviously weren’t even worth considering.) Plus Darwin found a protection spell that worked on everyone in a vehicle, which was actually pretty helpful that day she ran into a mailbox.

Darwin’s great at driving, but Erik is even better: something about his vampire powers makes him hyper-attuned to metal, which is an extremely weird vampiric side effect, but Raven’s heard of weirder. He’s also a total control freak, so just letting him drive saves them all a headache.

But right now, she kind of regrets not making him teach her to drive at night, because she should be heading down to the city to look for Charles alone, not with the entire household in the back seat. Erik has been deathly—pun intended!—silent for most of the ride, which is not a good sign. Silent Erik usually means he’s making plans, and you only want Planning Erik when he’s trying to figure out how to kill a bunch of demons or something.

Raven immediately regrets thinking about killing demons, because that only reminds her of their argument about Charles in the kitchen. Erik seemed convinced that she was moments away from dusting Charles…and maybe she is. He’s not Charles anymore, she keeps reminding herself. He’s a vampire—he’s just wearing Charles’s skin—and obviously, she remains a vampire slayer.

She glances at the vampire sitting in the driver’s seat, but he keeps staring at the road. She sighs and rests her head against the window, looking out at the dark, wide expanse of the Hudson.

Vampires are everywhere in New York City—kind of like the rat problem—but there are a few areas they seem to like best. Raven is a little surprised Charles was spotted in the Meatpacking District, because it’s such a cliché. If she wants to get a bunch of vamps done-and-dusted in a single night, she’ll often head there; these guys seem to think drunk models teetering in six-inch heels are easy pickings, but the wide, semi-deserted streets only make Raven’s job easier.

(She gets the fashion part, but she doesn’t understand why these women try to walk on cobblestones! One time a lady was so hysterical after watching her date get staked that Raven wound up throwing her over her shoulder, firefighter-style, to haul her back to a normal sidewalk.)

Erik parks the van—illegally, as usual—and turns off the ignition. Everyone in the back has been talking in low voices, but they fall silent as Erik twists to look at them.

“We’ll split up,” he instructs. “Keep in touch via text.”

“I’m with Darwin,” Alex says immediately, to absolutely no one’s surprise.

“So then Hank can go with Sean,” Darwin suggests.

Sean claps Hank on the shoulder. “Looks like it’s you and me, buddy.”

Hank frowns, squinting up towards the front seat. “Shouldn’t the two strongest—”

“I think Erik and Raven should stick together,” Darwin says. His voice is even, but there’s something beneath his words that Raven can’t decode.

Erik is silent for a long moment, his expression just as locked down as it’s been for the past hour, but he only says, “That’s fine.”

Erik has always been Raven’s favorite person to patrol with. The vampire strength is helpful, and the running snarky commentary makes things a lot more fun. But she especially likes how even though he swears he isn’t one anymore, Erik still kind of acts like a Watcher. The other guys sometimes have this instinct to protect her, which is insulting, feminism-wise, and also pretty stupid—she’s literally the Slayer. Erik defers to her, but he does it in an encouraging way, like killing a real, (un)live vampire is just another training exercise he’s supervising.

Having Erik to patrol with the past few years was also helpful because her actual Watcher couldn’t leave the house. Since she came to live with Charles when she was eleven, Raven had only ever seen him inside his giant old mansion, at one with the dusty books and creepy artifacts.

She eventually learned he wasn’t stuck there by choice: he was cursed, though at first, he kept the details vague. It wasn’t until she killed this truly psychotic vampire in her “Cruciamentum”—apparently an ancient, elaborately orchestrated ritual that will probably be the top bit of evidence when they finally arrest the Watchers Council for war crimes—that she learned exactly why Charles hadn’t been seen in public for years.

(The day the curse was finally lifted, Charles waited until the sun set and took the whole house out for ice cream. Erik couldn’t really enjoy ice cream, but he clearly enjoyed watching Charles eat it, which was actually a punishment for the rest of them.)

Both Erik and Charles had been pretty into the idea of patrolling with her together, which Raven wasn’t exactly thrilled about, because she didn’t want to be distracted by their eye-fucking while she was trying to stake a guy. In the end, though, they barely even had a chance to traumatize her: they only went out as a trio a handful of times before Charles was taken.

Unsurprisingly, Erik’s been a lot less fun on patrol these past few months. He only really seems to enjoy himself when there’s a new Cecil to taunt. The Cecils have not been happy that Raven is waaaaay more inclined to listen to a vampire than to them. She wonders if the Watchers Council gave Charles a lot of shit for dating a vampire; maybe Charles never even told them about it.

Does the Council know what happened to Charles? Shaw took him months ago—has Charles been a vampire all this time? Even if they wrote one of their fancy-stationery letters and put it on a slow boat from England, Raven feels like they would have heard about it long before now.

“The fucking Meatpacking District,” Erik mutters. A giant black Escalade slowly rolls past them, and he shakes his head. “It’s just so…tacky.”

“And not remotely Charles’s style,” Raven agrees, before she catches herself. “Sorry, not Charles. Vampire Charles. You’re all probably genetically programmed to prowl these clubs.”

“I can assure you that we’re not,” Erik says flatly, but then he gets a look of realization. “That’s it—” He glances around before he looks back at her. “He’s here because he knows that we know.”

“Know what?” Raven asks. “That this is Vampire Grand Central?” She pauses, putting a hand on her chin. “I mean, actual Grand Central is also kind of Vampire—”

“He wants us to find him,” Erik interrupts, his tone firm.

Raven frowns. “Why wouldn’t he just come up to North Salem?”

“The house is heavily warded,” Erik says. “In addition to the normal…” He waves his hand vaguely. “Vampire things.”

“But it’s Charles’s house,” Raven points out. “Wouldn’t the wards recognize him?”

Now Erik is frowning, and he says slowly, “I have no idea…”

“Oh—oh!” Raven tugs the sleeve of his leather jacket. “What happened when you died? Could you get back into your house?”

He stiffens and pulls out of her reach. “Try not to sound so excited about me being murdered.”

“Oh, come on,” Raven protests. “It’s been, like, twenty-five years. Isn’t there a statute of limitations?”

Erik opens his mouth, but then his eyebrows draw together. “Where did you learn the term ‘statute of limitations?’”

Raven glares at him. “I’m doing online college, remember?”

His eyebrows part again—and arch up high. “How many classes are you currently enrolled in?”

Raven huffs and pushes past him. She’s going to do double the classes next semester—she’s just been a little distracted recently. Though if she’s being honest, without Charles around to tut about the value of education, she actually has been finding it a little hard to care about learning things. Sometimes it doesn’t seem like there’s a point, when she might also have limited time left on—

“Raven,” Erik says in a low voice, coming very close to her. “Check out the suit.”

A very pale figure is heading up the block towards them, and his boxy grey suit looks like it’s older than she is. He’s going for nonchalant with his hands in his pockets, but it’s obvious he’s on the hunt.

“Split up?” Raven suggests.

Erik hums in disagreement before he says in her ear, “Knight in shining armor.”

Raven’s special talent—well OK, her special talent is obviously being the Slayer, but her personal twist is she’s also kind of a shapeshifter. Not literally, of course, but she’s always been able to make herself look pretty different depending on the circumstances; Charles said it was “uncanny.” With vampires, it’s most useful when she can make herself look even younger than she is. They all have these weird hangups about “the blood of innocents.”

Erik slings an arm over her shoulder, and Raven goes for a sort of “Oops! I just did a lot of underage drinking” vibe, giggling as she stumbles against him. Erik “helps” her stay upright while giving her a look that any outside observer would see as predatory. Even though they’re pretending—and besides, Erik’s got a soul—he’s still kind of scary when he makes that face.

They’ve done this before, so they know how to time it just right: when the guy is about a dozen feet away, Erik gets aggressive, crowding against her until Raven is cornered against the wall of the nearest building. She giggles louder—and then she starts to struggle. It’s kind of hard to make it look ineffectual; if she pushed even more than a little bit, Erik would be flat on his ass.

“Quit squirming,” he bites out, actually managing to sound pretty annoyed. She lets him take both her wrists and pin them to the brick.

“Leave me alone!” Raven shouts, flopping a little for effect. Erik shoots her a look that suggests she might be overdoing it.

But Boxy Suit seems to buy it, hurrying towards them and saying, “Hey! You wanna back off there, buddy?”

Erik slowly turns, his hands still firmly holding Raven’s wrists. “You know, I don’t think I do.”

Boxy Suit’s nostril’s flare. Up close, Raven can spot five other tells that he’s a vampire. Number six is how strong he seems to be as he grabs Erik by the shoulders and yanks him off her, shoving him to the ground.

(Raven sometimes feels a little bad that this routine can involve their target beating Erik up, but it’s a price she’s willing to pay for what inevitably happens next.)

And right on cue, he comes up and puts his arm around her shoulders. “Are you OK, miss?”

Raven twists to glance at Erik, who’s still laying flat on the ground, before she puts a hand on Boxy Suit’s chest and says, “Oh my God, that was so scary! Thank you.”

Maybe someday they will actually find a Good Samaritan Vampire who just continues on his way after “rescuing” her—but Raven is pretty sure that those don’t actually exist. Sure enough, Boxy Suit’s expression suddenly looks a lot like Erik’s predatory face. He tightens his grip on her shoulder as he says, “No, thank you—

Raven grabs both his lapels and makes a fist, and in one swift spinning motion, she’s got him pinned to the wall, her forearm pressing into his neck. He sputters as he grasps at the wall, failing to grab hold of the brick. “What the fuck?”

Raven pushes harder against his neck. “We’re looking for someone.”

“A vampire,” Erik says, suddenly right next to her shoulder.

“A vampire,” Raven echoes, nodding. “Short. Pale. British.”

“Very blue eyes,” Erik offers.

Raven gives him a look. If he starts waxing poetic about any other parts of Charles’s body—

“Short and British?” Boxy Suit lets out a laugh. “You’re actually looking for that psychopath?”

“Psychopath,” Erik repeats in a flat voice.

Boxy Suit just keeps laughing, so Raven presses even harder, and he makes a strained noise. He doesn’t need to breathe, so she can stay here all night if she needs to. But that would be boring for her, and probably pretty unpleasant for him—so it’s lucky that he seems eager to talk.

“Xavier, right?” he continues. “It’d be hard to find someone who hasn’t seen him the last few weeks. Really made a splash when he showed up in town.”

Something lurches in Raven’s stomach, but she tries to push the feeling away. “So if he’s everywhere, where exactly can we find him?”

Boxy Suit’s eyes flick to Erik before he looks back at her. “What do you have to offer me?”

There’s a rustle of movement, and Raven glances at Erik to see he’s now holding up a stake. He does the smile with too many teeth.

“How about the opportunity to walk away from this exchange largely unscathed,” he suggests. “Alternately, you could be swept up by the New York City Department of Sanitation in the morning.”

“Jesus Christ,” Boxy Suit says. “Aren’t you a—”

“I am,” Erik says. “She’s not.”

Boxy Suit looks back at Raven and his eyes widen. “You’re the Slayer.”

Raven smiles, too, and pushes against his neck one more time for good measure.

“Why didn’t you say so?” he wheezes. “If I knew you wanted to get that maniac off the street—”

“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” Raven interrupts, because she doesn’t really want to hear anything else about Charles the Psychopathic Vampire. “Where have you seen him?”

It turns out Charles has been spotted up and down the West Side over the past few weeks, and he has made his presence known. Boxy Suit also recognized Erik’s description of Azazel—but not Sebastian Shaw. Raven doesn’t know what to make of that, and apparently Erik doesn’t, either.

“Shaw always preferred Europe,” Erik says absently. “Paris, Berlin… Maybe they split up to cover more territory…”

“OK, how about we focus on one vampire at a time?” Raven suggests, though she feels like Erik isn’t even listening to her.

She pulls out her phone to check the group text. There’s nothing from Hank or Sean, but Darwin’s written twice. The first message basically confirms what Boxy Suit told them—everyone’s seen Charles. He follows it up with, “Meet at Gansevoort Plaza at midnight?”

The Meatpacking District is only a few blocks in each direction, but the whole West Side would take them a couple of nights to scour. They probably need to go into the clubs, too, which Raven can’t always get away with, even with her shapeshifting talent—some of these bouncers are real hard-asses about having a legal ID.

Gansevoort Plaza isn’t the most low-key meeting place—even on a Tuesday night, plenty of people are passing through. Erik hangs back on the periphery, clearly scanning everyone who walks by. Raven heads over to where Alex and Darwin are sitting; to no one’s surprise, they are very close together.

(She’s happy for them. Really. It’s not their fault she’s stuck in a house of apparently mostly gay men/supernatural creatures, not to mention that she has to go out hunting demons every night of the week, so of course she doesn’t have any dating life to speak of. Sometimes it seems like Hank has a crush on her, and she’s not necessarily opposed to the idea, but also…it’s Hank. He’d probably forget they had a date because he’d been down in the lab working on his werewolf-cure formula for thirty-six hours straight.)

“Any luck?” Darwin asks.

“Sounds like we got the same info as you,” Raven tells them.

“That Vampire Charles is apparently the devil incarnate?” Alex says, which is a little ironic coming from an actual (half-)demon.

The same feeling from earlier lurches in Raven’s stomach. She doesn’t know what she’s going to do when she’s finally face to face with Charles.

But she doesn’t have time to mull that one over—because suddenly, there’s a popping sound accompanied by the scent of sulfur, and Charles is standing in front of them, Azazel at his side.

“Raven,” he says, smiling. “Oh, and Darwin and Alex! It’s lovely to see you all again.”

Raven stares at him, trying very hard to keep her mouth from falling open. Everything about him just feels…wrong. Human Charles wore baggy cardigans and corduroys, but this Charles is dressed in a slim-cut suit—no tie, and a bunch of the buttons of his dress shirt undone. His hair is…styled. He’s just as pale as always, but somehow his skin seems brighter, almost glowing.

Human Charles looked like the kind of guy who’d be happy to help you find a library book. This Charles looks like the kind of guy who’d manage to get you alone and back to his place before you knew what was happening. Even if he was a total stranger and she’d passed him on the street, Raven would just know: Charles looks like a vampire.

“I hear you’ve been asking about me,” Charles says, still smiling in that unnerving way.

Raven glances at Alex and Darwin, who are now on their feet. Darwin frowns as he says, “We just got here. How did you—”

“You know, it’s quite interesting, really,” Charles says casually, waving a hand in a way that looks so much like Charles-in-lecturing mode that it’s kind of alarming. “All my years of research into the subject, and I still had no idea the degree to which vampirism could increase existing psychic powers.” He nods towards them, tapping his temple. “I can hear everything. Do more things, too. For example—”

He makes a sweeping gesture at the plaza, and it’s only then that Raven realizes none of the people passing by are giving them a second glance. Even in New York City, a guy who looks like a cartoon devil would probably turn a few heads.

“Charles…” she begins, but she realizes she doesn’t even know what to say. He’s Charles but he’s not Charles. If it were any other vampire, she’d be pulling out her stake right now. But…

“Oh, Raven,” Charles says, taking a step towards her. “You thought I was dead. Isn’t this better?”

Raven presses her lips together as Charles comes even closer. He reaches out and tucks a lock of her hair behind her ear. His fingers are eerily cold as they brush against her skin.

But before she can say anything, do anything, even think anything, Charles is looking past her shoulder—and suddenly, his entire demeanor shifts, his weird fake-friendly smile turning into something else entirely.

“Hello, darling,” he says.

Raven turns to look at Erik, whose mouth is set in a flat line. He’s silent for a long moment, but all he says is, “Charles.”

His voice is icy enough that it seems to break the spell Charles had cast over all of them. Raven takes a big step back to stand next to him.

Charles puts on a mock-sad face. “Why Erik, you don’t look happy to see me.”

“Where’s Shaw?” Erik demands.

Charles places a hand on his chest. “Oh, were you hoping to see him, too? Sorry to be the one to break the news: he’s dead.”

Raven glances at Azazel, who doesn’t look too torn up by Charles’s words; if anything, it seems like he thinks it’s kind of funny.

“Dead?” Erik repeats. “How?”

“It’s not something I was planning,” Charles says conversationally, stepping towards Erik. “Though I would have been well within my rights—he kept me prisoner for months.” He does a little shudder. “Not a well individual. When I was alive, I thought about…” He waves a hand. “Oh, characteristically foolish ideas about creating a kind of vampire prison or some such nonsense.”

“Months?” Raven says, suddenly feeling like she might cry.

“Don’t worry,” Charles says, turning to her. “I know you looked for me. Alas—” He shrugs. “You didn’t look hard enough.”

“He turned you and then you killed him,” Erik says.

Charles lets out a little laugh and turns back to him. “Always straight to the point, my Erik.”

“He’s not your Erik,” Alex says, sounding angry. “You’re not Charles.”

“Am I not?” Charles says, cocking his head as he turns towards Alex and Darwin. “I look like him. I have all his memories.” He turns back, reaching out a hand to gently brush against Erik’s temple. “I provoke the same reactions.”

Raven steps forward and slaps his hand away from Erik’s face. “You’re a vampire.”

Charles smiles. “So is Erik.”

“He’s nothing like you,” Raven says. “He has a soul.”

“Ah,” Charles says, looking amused. “You didn’t know Erik before he had a soul—but I did. And I can assure you—” He leans in close, like he’s about to tell her a secret. “There’s really very little difference.”

“You’re full of shit,” Raven snaps.

“Raven!” Charles steps back, looking scandalized. “I didn’t raise you to use such language.”

“You didn’t raise me,” Raven shoots back. “The real Charles did.”

Charles looks at Erik again, shaking his head in amusement. “This is very circular. I fear it could go on all night.” He glances at his watch. “But I’m afraid I don’t have all night. I—”

“Guys,” Sean says, running up to them. “We met this guy who said Charles is—” He catches sight of Charles and does a literal double take. “Fuck!”

“Sean!” Charles says, brightening. “Oh, and Hank, too—it’s so nice that the whole household came to see me. I really would love to stay and catch up, but as I was saying—” He gestures to Azazel. “I have to run. I left a few…people back at my flat.”

“You have a place in the city?” Darwin asks.

Charles lets out a dismissive kind of laugh. “Between the existing Xavier properties and all of Shaw’s holdings, I now have far more real estate than I know what to do with. Plus the main house, of course—” He nods to Raven. “I figured I’d avoid that one for the time being. What with the extensive antique crossbow collection—”

“And the person who knows how to use them,” she finishes coolly.

“Mmm, you say that,” Charles says, putting a finger to his lips. “And yet for all the weaponry on your person right now, you haven’t even thought about touching any of it.”

Raven raises her chin. “Try me.”

Charles laughs again. “All in due time, my dear. I’m sure we’ll see each other again soon.” He reaches towards Azazel, but then he pauses and adds, “Oh, and Erik?”

A few beats pass, and weirdly, neither Charles or Erik speak—they just stare at each other. Erik’s face remains totally blank, but eventually, Charles smiles.

He glances around at the rest of the rest of them and does a little wave as he says, “Goodnight, children.” When he touches Azazel’s arm, they whisk out of sight.

For a long moment, no one says anything, staring at the spot where Charles was just standing.

And then Sean says, more emphatically this time, “Fuck.”

*

Raven had what most people would call a “rough childhood,” but what psychologists and caseworkers would call—well, it’s not actually worth listing all the official terms, because the system totally failed her, which is why she found herself embarking on a career of breaking and entering at eleven years old.

Even then, she was good at shapeshifting. It helped her get rides from town to town—if she went a couple years younger, most people saw her as a lost little girl, and if she went a couple years older, perverts saw her as “old enough to look at,” which they did plenty of as they leered in the direction of the passenger seat. It obviously wasn’t a great situation, but she’d always been unnaturally strong, and she seemed to have this innate instinct for fighting. These were a few of the many reasons her biological mother liked to call her “the spawn of Satan.”

Without any real plan, Raven wound up heading downstate—not all the way to the city, but to the sprawling rich-people towns of Westchester County, where half the giant houses seemed to be empty at any given time. Sure, there were security systems, even guards, but she was talented at avoiding that stuff, too. Sometimes she thought she really was the spawn of Satan.

After a few weeks, things were going…well, they were going. She mostly only stole food, sleeping in sheds, or better yet, pool houses. She had a few close calls, but she was a fast runner. And then, as she was making her way through one of the fanciest towns yet, she found herself breaking into the strangest mansion she’d ever encountered.

It was—no joke—a dark and stormy night, and Raven slipped in through a side door totally drenched, trying her best to dry off as she made her way along the narrow, dimly lit hallways. It was only once she got into the main part of the house that she realized: the place was legit haunted.

Most rich people had paintings of dead relatives and elaborate rugs and a lot of stuff with gold on it. This house had all those things, too, but it also had weird old books on stands and crystal balls and an excessive number of crosses, even though it all felt extremely not-Christian.

(A lot of it actually reminded her of the store in her hometown run by this old woman with long grey hair, who everyone at school said was a witch. Raven would stop by there regularly, asking the woman what all the items were for—and even though she had to know Raven would never be able to buy anything, the woman always seemed very happy to see her. It made Raven think that if the woman was a witch, was that really such a bad thing?)

Haunted house or not, she was starving, so she couldn’t spend much time lingering over the decorations. And yeah, maybe she should have noticed the house seemed occupied—not just the bunch of lights that were on, but especially the perishable food in the refrigerator.

But again, starving. She grabbed the first thing she saw, which was a block of cheese. She had just swallowed a big bite when someone cleared their throat. The cheese fell from her hands, and she dropped into a defensive position.

A man was standing in the doorway with his hands on his hips. Raven allowed herself to be distracted by his fancy blue pajama set for approximately two seconds—he looked like a character in a children’s book!—before her instincts kicked in and she moved to run.

The man, however, was weirdly fast, and he darted forward and caught her. She thrashed against him, using all her strength to try and break free. When she thrust an elbow back against his torso, he let out a loud, “Oof!”

“Let me go!” she shouted.

“Stop struggling,” the man gritted out, wrapping his arms around her shoulders and tugging her tight against him. “You need to calm down.”

“I’ll bite you,” she warned, and she really would have—his arm was right there.

But then, somehow, she heard the words directly inside her head: CALM DOWN.

Raven was so startled that she froze, which the man immediately took advantage of, spinning her around and effectively trapping her against the kitchen island. The man’s face was red, and his hair was sticking up at funny angles.

“Stop….” he repeated, trying to catch his breath as he held her firm. “…struggling…”

Raven stared up at him, suddenly petrified. She’d never been caught before. The man was pretty short, and under other circumstances, he’d probably seem friendly-looking, but she knew that even the nicest-looking men could be genuinely terrible. He was probably going to call the police, or worse, he might want to—

“I’m not going to call the police,” the man said. “And I’m certainly not going to hurt you.”

It was only then that she registered that he had a British accent. And, after a beat, she also realized that he’d just read her thoughts.

“Raven, is it?” he asked. “I’m Charles. And yes—” One corner of his mouth quirked up. “I did just read your thoughts.”

Raven’s mind spun—talk about characters in books! If Charles hadn’t literally just proved it, she never would have believed him. But then she remembered the bigger deal in the moment: he still had her pinned. He was holding her tightly, though not tight enough to hurt.

She aimed for seeming even younger as she said, “Will you let me go?” After a pause, she pushed out her bottom lip and added for good measure, “Please?”

Charles gave her a flat look. “Not until you explain why you broke into my kitchen in the middle of the night to steal a block of cheese.”

Raven figured there was nothing better to say than the truth. “I was hungry.”

Charles’s face fell, and his grip on her arms loosened. “Oh no—you need a proper meal.” He glanced at the block of cheese, which was still laying in the middle of the kitchen floor, and as he looked back at her, he smiled again. “A growing girl can’t live on cheddar alone, you know.”

And that’s how Raven found herself sitting at the kitchen table of a giant haunted house on a dark and stormy night, being served warmed-up leftovers by a very strange British man wearing silky blue pajamas who would soon become her guardian, and eventually, her Watcher.

At first, it was like a fairytale. Raven had always thought of rich people as greedy and kind of mean (she had plenty of first-hand evidence backing this up!), but Charles was extremely nice and also very excited to buy her things—literally anything she wanted. She claimed a corner room on the second floor with a huge walk-in closet, which they totally filled up in just a few weeks. Charles also bought her a brand-new computer, which he unfortunately made her use to do school, but it was a small price to pay for basically living like a princess.

But she quickly realized that a man who lived in such a strange house had a pretty strange life more generally. Never mind all the creepy stuff (which looked just as creepy during the day) or the fact that he spent most of his time buried in dusty old books. All the things he bought her? They ordered them online, because Charles did not leave the house—at all. Delivery people came by with basically everything they needed. A nice woman named Maggie bought groceries and cooked meals for them to heat up later, because, in her words, “Charles could burn water.”

Charles was so friendly and seemed totally normal in all his interactions, but Raven knew something was off. She looked up the word on her new computer—agoraphobia—and carefully brought it up over dinner one night.

“What?” he said, frowning, but after a second, his expression cleared. “Oh no, sorry—it’s not that I don’t want to leave the property. Trust me, to say ‘I’d love to’ would be the world’s biggest understatement.” He sat back in his chair, looking a little sad. “It’s just that I can’t leave.”

Raven stared at him. “Are you a wanted felon?”

Charles let out a surprised laugh. “More like a prisoner, actually…”

And that’s how she found out Charles was cursed—and also how she found out curses were real.

Over the next few days, she learned that a lot of things that people said were made-up were actually real. Witches, for example, and ghosts. Plus “other creatures,” as Charles called them, because he didn’t want to say more at first. Eventually, Raven wore him down, and he revealed that yes, werewolves and zombies and vampires were real, too.

Studying this stuff was apparently Charles’s job, though he didn’t want to say more on that at first, either—not until she’d been living there for a few months, when he knocked on her bedroom door one afternoon. Raven was supposed to be studying, but she’d actually been dancing around her giant room and using her bed like a gymnastics vault; she thought she’d been fast enough getting to the desk before he opened the door, until she remembered he was psychic.

But Charles actually seemed too distracted to scold her. He was holding a thick envelope, and he came to perch on the edge of her bed, looking very somber as he said, “Raven, we need to talk.”

Raven suddenly felt sick. The letter had to be from the government, or her biological parents. Or maybe Charles had changed his mind about taking care of a kid, and it was her acceptance to a boarding school.

She could have kept guessing all day, and she’d never have gotten to “one girl in all the world is chosen to slay vampires, and you’re on the list of potential candidates.”

That was the word Charles used: she was a Potential, with a capital P. He explained that there were a lot of Potentials in the world, so there was a good chance that she’d never have to be the official Slayer (that was with a capital S, too). He also told her about Watchers—his actual job—and the Watchers Council, which sounded like some sort of shadowy all-powerful organization, from the way they didn’t actually have special abilities but still controlled all these Slayers. They were also powerful enough to decide whether or not Raven could keep on living with Charles. Since she was a Potential—and, if she became the Slayer, Charles would become her Watcher—they said that she could stay.

“There’s also the matter of the actual government,” Charles said, giving her half a smile. “So if you’re all right with me formally adopting you—oof.”

Raven was across the bed in a flash, throwing her arms around him and squeezing tight. Charles hugged her back, running a gentle hand along her hair. He smelled a little like the witch’s shop in her hometown.

When they pulled apart, she said, “What if my parents try to take me back?” She didn’t add a, Please, please, pleeeeeease no, though she thought it very hard.

Charles’s smile turned a little sad. “The Council already arranged things with them. It shouldn’t be an issue.”

The Watchers Council, Raven decided then, really was a shadowy all-powerful organization.

It wasn’t until she was older that she understood why Charles had mixed feelings that day. Learning more about the history of Slayers and their general life expectancy, it was pretty obvious that it was a death sentence—and it seemed extra-cruel to make a Watcher raise a Slayer for years beforehand, so that he wasn’t just a mentor, but basically her father, too. Never mind that Charles was only a decade older than she was—he’d seemed so old in those silky blue pajamas!—he was still more of a parent to her than anyone she was actually related to.

Most of the time, Raven did a good job forgetting about the terrible fate hanging over her head. She loved living with Charles, even if he made her study demonic possession and algebra. And over the years, he started taking in more “strays,” as they often called them: first a warlock named Darwin, then a banshee named Sean. Raven found Alex the half-demon setting things on fire one night while she was on patrol. And it was Alex and Darwin who found Hank, a werewolf who was somehow an even bigger nerd than Charles; when they brought him back to the house, Charles immediately offered him a bedroom and a lab for his experiments.

And then Raven found Erik—or maybe more accurately, Erik found her. And yeah, sure, she was interested in him at first. He was very handsome! (She didn’t know much about his personality at the time.)

Of course, all that flew out the window the second Erik and Charles were in a room together. And then, she sort of had two fathers—and yes, thinking of Erik that way definitely took the sting out of her initial crush. Plus he was actually old. Not, like, ancient or anything, but he’d been a vampire longer than she’d even been alive.

As for the curse, well, she finally learned the whole truth after the Cruciamentum. Years ago, when Charles and Erik first met, Erik killed a Slayer who’d found the two of them together, and Charles’s house arrest was his punishment. (Erik’s punishment was apparently self-inflicted, what with the soul restoring and all.) Charles was free now because those were the Council’s conditions: train the Slayer to pass their ancient torture ritual, and he was allowed to go to the mall or whatever.

At first, Raven was kind of mad that Charles had been lying to her for years, but then Erik told her the whole truth—the Council made Charles keep the conditions of the curse a secret, or it would be permanent. According to Erik, Charles had been torn up about keeping it from her. After that, she was more than just “kind of mad” at the Watchers Council. A shadowy all-powerful organization that got off on cursing people and sending teenage girls out to die while they all sipped tea and wrote letters with quills?

But sometimes, when she thinks about what happened after the curse was lifted, part of her wishes that Charles was still trapped in his giant haunted house—because as annoying as it had to be for him all those years, at least he was safe. After all, there was only one vampire who was allowed to come inside.

*

No one returned from seeing Charles the Vampire particularly thrilled about the experience. But over the next couple of days, Raven notices that Erik is acting…weird.

He barely said a word on the ride home to North Salem that night, and he hasn’t said much more since. It’s not like the rest of them are talking about it constantly, but they have been talking about it. Erik, on the other hand, has been excusing himself whenever the subject comes up, and Raven’s noticed he often has a strange look in his eyes when he does. Mostly, he’s made himself scarce; she knows of at least four of his brooding spots around the house, and she’s spotted him in all four.

With Charles gone, Raven is by far the closest to Erik of all of them, but she knows she can’t be the only person who’s noticed. She decides to question the others about it, one by one.

“Wouldn’t you act weird?” Alex says as they make their way through the grocery store. “Like, for months you think your boyfriend is dead, but surprise! He’s actually an evil vampire.”

“Yeah, sure,” Raven says, pulling down a giant box of Cinnamon Toast Crunch and putting it in the cart. “He’s just been so quiet? Even when we were talking to Charles. It just felt…off.”

“Yeah, because he’s such a talkative guy,” Alex says sarcastically.

“He is, though!” Raven insists. “He’s always making these snarky comments…”

She’s temporarily distracted by the colors of all the cereal boxes. She grabs an equally large box of Fruit Loops, then one she’s never seen before that literally has a bowl of cookies on the front.

“No,” Alex says firmly, picking up the cookie cereal and putting it back on the shelf. “You can have one garbage cereal. Anything else we buy needs to have fiber.”

Raven stares at him. “When did you become such a nutrition freak?”

“Since I realized that without Charles around, I was the only thing standing between this house and scurvy!”

Raven rolls her eyes and continues walking down the aisle. Even though September’s barely started, there’s a big Halloween display at the end—and as they get closer, she spots a very familiar cartoon character.

“Ooh,” she says, grabbing a box. “I didn’t know they were still making Count Chocula!”

“Now who’s the insensitive one?” Alex mutters.

Sean, unsurprisingly, seems to have a very Zen attitude about the whole thing.

“We were all getting used to Charles being dead,” he says while he portions weed onto a rolling paper. “Now we basically hit the reset button.”

“I mean, sort of,” Raven says. She’s sitting on the sill of an open window in his bedroom, and she glances out at the never-ending green lawn for a moment before she looks back at him. “Dead-dead means we just had to get used to it. Terrible-vampire-dead means…”

“That you might have to do something about it,” Sean says, nodding. He licks the rolling paper and seals up the joint. “Bad situation all around, man.”

That’s definitely part of the problem—because Raven is worried that Erik’s weirdness means they’re not on the same page when it comes to Charles. To be fair, she’s not even sure what page she’s on when it comes to Charles. If it were any other vampire on a killing spree so dramatic all the other vampires were talking about it, she’d be plotting to kill him as soon as possible. But she keeps picturing Charles standing there, with his fancy suit and perfect hair and pale glowing skin, looking kind of…evil. Her brain short-circuits whenever she thinks of that as “Charles.”

Sean lights the joint and takes a long drag, slowly blowing the smoke towards the ceiling, and then he smiles and holds it up. “You want some?”

Raven looks out the window again. It’s a beautiful day, and it’s finally a little bit cooler; she should probably go for a long run. She looks back at Sean and the joint in his hand.

“Yeah, fuck it,” she says. Sean just laughs as he passes it over.

She doesn’t know why she even bothers with Hank. He’s barely paying attention to other people under the best of circumstances.

“Sorry,” he says, not even looking up from his notebook. About six inches from his hand, a green liquid in a beaker is bubbling ominously; it looks fake, like something from a bad horror movie. He keeps scribbling as he continues, “I’ve mostly been down here the past few days, so…”

Raven doesn’t roll her eyes, but she does say, “Yeah, just like always.”

Hank glances up at her, and after a beat, his eyes widen. “Oh! You know that you look, um…” He rubs the back of his neck with his free hand. “…really nice today?”

Raven looks down at her short black skirt and cropped red sweater. OK, so maybe she did put on a cuter outfit to talk to Hank—it’s like a test, to see if he’d notice. And he passed.

“Thank you,” she says, giving him a big grin.

Hank’s cheeks seem very pink as he puts his pencil down and pushes his glasses up his nose. “To your original question, I haven’t observed anything unusual regarding Erik’s behavior since we were in Manhattan the other night. But I can keep an eye out, if that would be helpful.”

“It would,” Raven says, nodding. “Thanks.” And then she turns and heads towards the door—and if she exaggerates her walk a little, well, maybe that’s a kind of test, too.

Really, she should have just gone to Darwin first and skipped the rest of them—that one’s on her.

“Yeah, for sure I’ve noticed,” he says. “Quieter than normal, but also kind of shifty?”

“Exactly!” Raven exclaims, whacking him on the shoulder. As he winces and rubs it a little, she adds, “Uh…sorry.”

He lets out a laugh as he shakes his head. “No worries.”

It’s just after ten, and they’re patrolling the streets of Sleepy Hollow, which Raven is unsurprised to see is already going into full Halloween mode—early September, sure, but it’s also kind of their whole thing. Well, that and hosting a lot of vampire activity. She’s certainly done plenty of staking in other Westchester towns over the years, but unless she’s going down to the city, Sleepy Hollow is the best use of her time.

They walk in silence for a little while before Darwin says, “Do you think we can trust him?”

Raven glances in his direction, but Darwin is looking straight ahead. “Trust who?”

“Erik.” Darwin shoves his hands in his pockets. “Even before we saw Charles…” He finally glances at her. “I was getting a vibe.”

“What kind of vibe?” Raven asks, frowning.

“I don’t know,” Darwin says. “Look, I’m not trying to sling baseless accusations here. But Erik is a vampire—”

“He’s got a soul, though,” Raven points out.

“But what does that even mean?” Darwin says. “It’s such a rare ritual—there are only a few documented cases ever, and they’re pretty short on details. Plus, we don’t even know what Erik was like pre-soul, or, for that matter, what he was like back when he was human.”

“The other night,” Raven says slowly, trying to put the pieces together. “When you insisted Erik and I look for Charles together…”

“Insurance,” Darwin says in a matter-of-fact voice. “I thought you might try to kill Charles if you found him—and I thought Erik might make sure that didn’t happen.”

Raven stares at him. “You don’t think we need to kill Charles?”

“Well…” Darwin shrugs. “I guess I do now. But before, I didn’t know…”

“That Charles is apparently such an evil vampire that the other vampires are scared of him?”

Darwin gives her a wry look. “Yeah. That.”

Raven sighs. Maybe she should tell Darwin that despite her better instincts, she’s pretty torn, too. She just doesn’t think she can look Charles in the eye and shove a stake through his heart. Maybe if one of the others wanted to—

“Raven!” Darwin shouts. “Look out!”

And then something’s flying through the air towards her, knocking her to the ground. Whatever it is, it’s extremely heavy. She rocks from side to side, finally getting enough purchase to push it off of her—and she learns it’s a very large vampire with a very bad comb-over.

“The Slayer,” he says, looking like he’s won the jackpot.

Raven rolls her eyes. Things were better before these jokers started to recognize her.

“Raven!” Darwin shouts again, tugging the vampire backwards by his ugly jacket, which gives her just enough space to wriggle out from under him.

Unfortunately, the vampire stands, spins around, and hurls Darwin in the direction of a nearby dumpster. Raven lets out a noise of dismay and hurries over to make sure he’s still breathing. Luckily, he is; he’s even conscious. She wonders if he did one of his armor spells before they left—they tend to leave him in better shape than your average non-Slayer. But it still doesn’t look like he’s getting up anytime soon.

“Ugh,” she moans, shooting the vampire a dirty look over her shoulder. “Could you not hurt my friends, please?

Even with Darwin out of commission, it actually doesn’t take that long to kill the guy—he might be massive, but he is not remotely quick. When she helps Darwin up, he’s groggy, but he’s probably not concussed. They still decide to head home early, though Darwin getting injured means she unfortunately needs to be the one to drive.

“OK, but it’s not that much different from driving during the day,” Darwin insists as she helps him gingerly slide into the passenger seat. “Just take it slow, and…actually pay attention.”

“Right,” Raven says, trying to sound confident. “Maybe you could do the spell that protected us against that mailbox, though?”

They manage to make it home in one piece (it was probably for the best that Darwin was still a little out of it), but after she gets him up to his room, Raven has so much pent-up energy that she needs to hit things for at least an hour. Even though she can do it by herself, it’s way more fun with Erik—but as she wanders through the house, there’s no sign of him. He’s not in any of his known brooding spots.

Alex is taking care of Darwin, and Hank is probably still in his lab, so she knocks on Sean’s door. It’s after midnight, but she knows Sean is a night owl.

“Yeah, he went out,” Sean tells her. “Not that long ago—” He gestures to the open window. “I saw him drive away.”

“So you didn’t talk to him before he left?” Raven asks. “Find out where he was going?”

Sean shakes his head. “You know how he is.” He wiggles his fingers. “Very mysterious.”

It’s true—Erik leaves at night all the time. He has to get blood, of course, and Raven is pretty sure he has brooding spots outside the house, too. She puts her vague sense of unease out of her mind as she heads down to the gym. She winds up punching things for two hours.

But Erik isn’t back by the time she goes to bed, so when she wakes up, she bypasses the kitchen and descends down to what they jokingly call his “lair,” the room in the basement where he spends a lot of daylight hours. He’s even got a coffin in there; Raven still can’t believe he actually sleeps in it.

But his lair is empty—the coffin is open, and there’s no one in it. She searches the house again, even the brooding spots that, during daylight, would burn Erik to a crisp. When she finally reaches the kitchen, she finds the rest of the household eating breakfast; everyone but Alex appears to be enjoying a bowl of Count Chocula.

“Have you seen Erik?” she asks them. They all look up at her and shake their heads.

“He isn’t downstairs?” Darwin asks.

“No,” Raven says. “I couldn’t find him anywhere.”

Alex is frowning as he says, “Do you think something happened to him last night?”

“He probably was out somewhere and couldn’t get home before sunrise,” Hank says. He makes it sound totally logical, but for some reason, Raven can’t quite buy it.

“Maybe,” she says, grabbing a bowl and reaching for the Count Chocula box.

She doesn’t want to tell the others what she’s thinking—but she’s got a strong suspicion where Erik went last night, and where he is right now.

*

All those years of study—doing painstaking research, poring through archives and primary sources, cataloguing and documenting everything into endless spreadsheets and essays and monographs—but in the end, Charles realized just how theoretical it all was. He couldn’t truly understand vampires until he actually became one.

Well, perhaps that was worth amending: spending several years fucking a vampire certainly gave one a great deal of insight that couldn’t be gleaned from books. But much of that, of course, was about the curious details of vampire anatomy and physiology—the heavy weight of Erik’s cock, fully erect yet somehow just as cold as the rest of him, or the feel of Erik’s fangs nipping at his neck, his wrist, the inside of his thigh, taking just a little taste as Charles writhed beneath him.

Remarkable control, Charles thinks in retrospect. He knew it intellectually at the time, but to come at it from the vampire end is another thing entirely. He certainly hasn’t managed as much in his admittedly short time among the undead; whenever there’s a warm body in his arms, he’s overwhelmed by the urge to drain it dry.

Like right now: this one was young and fit, and he struggled at first, but he’s finally gone limp, sinking bonelessly into the sofa as Charles drinks him down, the firm skin beneath his fingers growing cold, the weakening consciousness flitting in and out, like a bulb that’s just about to go.

He withdraws his fangs from the boy’s neck and pulls back slightly to study him. He was pretty in life, and he’s rapidly approaching pretty in death. He runs a hand along the boy’s cheek for a moment, and then he tilts towards him again, sliding his fangs into the same puncture wounds he made at the start—he’s got to get the last of it.

Because the blood—well, no one ever really explained the blood bit properly, Erik included, but it’s better than any drug he’s ever had. It makes him feel full and powerful and utterly blissed out, like the world’s greatest orgasm, but on steroids. He doesn’t understand how Erik’s been subsisting on bagged blood these past few years—and usually animal blood at that—when the real live thing feels so…astounding. If it were up to him, he’d drink and drink and drink, anyone he could get his fangs on, until he felt like he was going to burst—

He sits back heavily against the sofa. He can feel the boy’s blood dripping down his chin. It’s possible he may have overdone it.

He spends the next few minutes splayed out, his entire body thrumming in a blood-fueled haze, until he’s startled back to awareness by a familiar popping sound from the foyer. It’s accompanied by laughter: Azazel, of course, but his telepathy supplies that the other voices are Janos and Angel. Shaw’s whole crew—or lately, his whole crew.

“Jesus Christ,” Angel says as she enters the room. “Did you kill an entire lacrosse team?”

Charles lifts his head to look first at her, then at the other pretty boys, blood-stained and tinged blueish-grey: the one on the far end of the sofa, the one on the chair, the one on the floor. The room spins a little, and he drops his head again. It’s more than merely possible that he’s overdone it.

“Why bring back one when you can just as easily bring back five?” he says airily in the direction of the ceiling—and then he lifts his head once more to tell Janos, “I left one for you in the closest guest bedroom. If you want to wake him up first, give him a good shake.”

Janos smiles and nods, and then his features shift as his fangs protract, and he strides out of the room. Charles does a sort of vague wave in the direction of Angel and Azazel.

“Whatever you two eat, I’m afraid you’ll have to provide it yourself,” he says, and then he drops back against the sofa again and closes his eyes.

Azazel only laughs, but Angel makes an affronted noise and says, “I eat normal food, thank you very much.”

“Normal,” Charles echoes, eyes still closed. “You’re an acid-spitting demon who can fly.”

“And enjoy a salad,” she shoots back, and then he hears what are no doubt a pair of terrifyingly spiked heels clicking in the direction of the kitchen.

“You want me to clean all this up, boss?” Azazel asks.

Charles cracks an eye open. Azazel, as always, looks very amused. He was amused when Shaw held Charles prisoner for months and amused when Shaw turned him—and he seemed equally amused when Charles immediately killed Shaw and said, “How about you work for me instead?”

Having a teleporting right-hand demon has been extraordinarily helpful so far, and not just for the ease of transport. Charles isn’t sure what he’d do with all these bodies if he didn’t have someone to whisk them away, especially because he’s chosen to set up shop in Shaw’s monstrously garish flat on Central Park South. Disposing of the dead from 59 stories up would be…inconvenient, to put it mildly.

“Yes, thank you,” he tells Azazel. “That would be lovely.”

Azazel does a little bow and then bends, grunting as he hauls the boy from the floor up into a bridal carry. With a wink, he pops out of the room.

Charles partly chose this flat for the novelty of it. There’s an old Xavier property across the park that would have suited just fine: buttoned-up and respectable, full of old books and priceless family heirlooms. But there was something deeply entertaining about spending his first months as a vampire in an ugly towering skyscraper full of billionaire tax-dodgers—one with floor-to-ceiling windows that offered “great natural light” to boot.

Beyond the joke of it, though, it appealed because Shaw already had it fixed up perfectly for vampiric life: full blackout window treatments, and sofas and carpets that are surprisingly easy to get blood out of, unless it’s just that the cleaning staff are as talented as they are discreet. It’s also quite the locale to bring people back to on the pretense that they’re all about to have a party—tonight, for example, as evidenced by the array of glasses and bottles on the coffee table.

Charles closes his eyes again. Those boys had quite a lot to drink. Perhaps he’s a little residually drunk, too.

No, he’s quite certain now that the only way to understand being a vampire is to actually be a vampire. As a human, he’d had all sorts of inane, fretting notions about what sort of vampire he’d become were he to be turned—he’d worried that his telepathy, the mortal version of which pales in comparison to what he possesses now, combined with his natural intelligence would render him notably mad and notably cruel.

He’s felt quite sane these last few weeks—remarkably so. As to the other concern…

Perhaps if he hadn’t known so much about vampires—or if he hadn’t worked so hard to convince himself of an outcome that he knew, deep down, wasn’t as predictable as all that—Charles might have given into Shaw a lot sooner.

Being kept prisoner was part frightening, part mundane. Shaw would seem to forget about him for days on end, then return and, just like the first time he kidnapped Charles, ply him with tea and cakes. He’d go on and on about the majesty of being a vampire, that they were the superior race, how it would be but the work of a moment for Charles to join their ranks. It was clear he wanted Charles to truly choose to be turned, rather than what he’d done to Erik.

At first, Charles had subsisted on the hope that Raven, Erik, and the others would rescue him. His accommodations were admittedly quite nice for a prison, and Azazel was happy to fetch him whatever books he wanted, but he was barely allowed beyond his pair of rooms. When Azazel would take him outside for fresh air, he would catalogue their surroundings: cool and a little damp, even when it was clearly summer, likely in Northern Europe somewhere. He suspected they were near the sea—he’d catch whiffs of it when the wind shifted. But that information was useless; they were obviously in the middle of nowhere, and his telepathy barely worked on either Azazel or Shaw, certainly not enough to try to make a run for it.

As the weeks turned to months, he slowly came to accept that Raven, Erik, and the others probably thought he was dead. And before long, he was dead. In the end, the circumstances of his turning weren’t all that different from Erik’s—though he doesn’t know if Erik, weakened after Shaw’s fangs were in his neck, begged and pleaded as Shaw forced his mouth open, or if Erik looked up at Shaw’s maniacal grin and watched the drops of blood fall from Shaw’s wrist in horror.

But the moment he opened his eyes again, all of his worries, all of his fears, all of his inhibitions were suddenly gone. The world was in crystalline focus. It was miraculous.

“Well, my boy,” Shaw said, smiling. “Isn’t this everything I promised?”

“And more,” Charles murmured, idly running a finger down the ridges of his transformed face and gently prodding first his right fang, then his left. He’d touched Erik’s often enough—he knew just how sharp they were—but he couldn’t get over the fact that these were his.

“I’ve got big plans for the two of us,” Shaw continued, walking slowly back and forth across the length of the room, his hands behind his back. “Well, the three of us, when we get Erik back.”

“You won’t get Erik back,” Charles said, laughing at the absurdity of the idea. “He’s got a soul now.” He paused, remembering when they first met. “Though you couldn’t even get him back before he had a soul, could you?”

“A soul,” Shaw drawled, waving a dismissive hand. “Difficult to affix, but easy to remove.”

“Is it?” Charles asked, curious. There was so little literature on the subject, and he was pretty sure he’d read all of it.

Like he was the psychic, Shaw said, “You read libraries of centuries-old books and you think you know the world—but you forget that I’ve actually been living in the world for centuries.” His tone was indulgent, like he was talking to a small and not particularly bright child. He put his hand on his chin, affecting a thinking pose, as he added, “Well, I suppose not ‘living,’ per se—”

“So that’s your plan, then?” Charles interrupted. “Capture Erik somehow, remove his soul…”

“And have the two of you at my side, forever,” Shaw finished. “A matched set. You looked so appealing together as vampire and human. A pair of vampires would be…” He shrugged eloquently. “Perfection.”

Charles quite liked the idea of spending forever with Erik. He was less enthused about the idea of doing it as a sort of co-lackey to the blowhard who murdered the both of them.

It was only then that he realized that his sense of Shaw’s mind—which was far louder than it had been when he was alive just a few minutes ago—was different from the way the lights looked brighter now, or the colors of the room richer. Namely, he could feel the strength of his perceptions—of his telepathy.

To test this theory, he thought very purposefully in Shaw’s direction: Pause.

Shaw paused his pacing, just for a moment—and then he looked at Charles with narrowed eyes. “What did you just do?”

“Interesting,” Charles said. “In fact, very interesting.” He hauled himself out of his chair, putting his hands in his pockets as he walked closer to Shaw. “In all of your centuries un-living, what precisely have you learned about psychics who get turned into vampires?”

But before Shaw could even reply, Charles cocked his head and thought: Dance.

Shaw started doing a jig—and the expression on his face was murderous. “Stop this nonsense!”

Charles smiled. “You’re quite the dancer, Sebastian. But if you insist—”

He was really getting the hang of it now. He didn’t actually have to think words to elicit actions: he could just guide the mind along, like a puppeteer, tugging at the strings. Shaw stopped dancing the second Charles thought about it. If he’d had this degree of control as a human, he would have left this place months ago; he could have ordered Azazel to transport him right back home.

But he didn’t, and now he was dead. It seemed like there was only one thing to do about that.

“Freeze,” he said aloud—as he thought the command as hard as he could.

Shaw froze, his mouth open in a little “o,” his arm outstretched in an aborted gesture of protest. Charles kept his hands in his pockets as he walked in a slow circle around him, assessing his handiwork. It really was quite remarkable—he could make anyone, even wildly powerful, centuries-old vampires, do whatever he wanted. He had a few options here: simply leave, perhaps, or use his newfound upper-hand to imprison Shaw in turn.

But really, all that “master race” talk was so tedious, and he couldn’t be bothered with Shaw repeatedly trying to capture Erik and keep him for the rest of time—that was Charles’s job.

He knew from his studies that very old vampires required very large weapons: a simple stake wouldn’t do. Luckily, Shaw had a pair of heavy-looking swords mounted in an X above the fireplace. Human Charles would have struggled to even lift them; now, it was exceedingly simple to tug one off the wall.

Shaw didn’t react as Charles approached, sword aloft—he was still frozen. But Charles liked to imagine that internally, he was begging and pleading. He raised the sword and sliced off Shaw’s head in one smooth motion, and after a beat, both Shaw’s head and body crumbled to dust.

“Well,” Charles said briskly, tossing the sword to the ground. It clattered loudly against the stone floor. “That was surprisingly straightforward.”

He spent the next hour fully exploring the house in which he’d been held prisoner, learning that they were, in fact, in Norway. “Middle of nowhere” was an understatement—they were actually on a large but remote island. A quick check of the entirety of the grounds, not just the small patch Azazel had limited him to, revealed there was no boat, not even a dock. The perfect set-up for a vampire kidnapper who traveled solely by teleportation.

So Charles returned to Shaw’s study and sat back down in the armchair in which he’d been turned into a vampire, waiting for said teleporter to return. And when Azazel finally did, he quickly spotted the sword laying near the pile of ashes at Charles’s feet; after blinking in surprise for a few moments, he started to laugh. When Charles proceeded to offer him a new job, he clearly understood where his future lay.

“Where can I take you, boss?” he said, bowing slightly and extending a hand.

“Anywhere with people,” Charles told him, grinning. “I’m starving.”

Perhaps being a vampire was harder if you couldn’t control minds, but Charles could, so the whole thing was laughably easy—it was like one big game every night. Even without his telepathy, he seemed to be physically stronger than others, which he suspected was down to Shaw’s lineage and however vampire genetics worked, because Erik was very strong, too. As Charles noted this, he thought with some amusement that they were like vampire brothers now.

He desperately wanted to see Erik, but he knew he needed to do things properly. Finally back stateside, he suppressed the urge to head directly to Westchester, instead setting up shop in Shaw’s pencil-tower flat, acquainting himself with Angel and Janos, and spending several weeks leaving an ostentatiously bloody trail across the West Side of Manhattan. Charles knew that sooner or later, someone from the house would get word of his appearance in town.

And he was right: just as he’d hoped, Erik came to him. But then, so did Raven and the rest of the children. The boys were fired up, but Raven was another matter—even if Charles hadn’t been able to read her mind, he’d still have registered her conflicted demeanor. Erik, however…

He’d dropped the address to this flat directly into Erik’s mind that evening. It was only a matter of time before there was a knock at his door.

“So where did you find them, really?” Angel says.

Charles blinks awake, startled. He must have drifted off for a few minutes. The boy in the chair is now gone, too, and Angel has taken his seat. She’s holding a glass of wine, and her legs are crossed, displaying what are indeed terrifyingly spiked heels—a pair of knee-high boots with complicated-looking laces.

He glances at the remaining pair of corpses as he says, “Not terribly far from here—Hell’s Kitchen.” He pats the thigh of the boy closest to him. “They were quite sweet, really.”

Angel snorts. “So sweet that you had to kill the whole group?”

Charles sniffs. “I wouldn’t want to leave anyone out.”

Angel laughs outright at that, but as she finishes the last of her wine, Charles can sense she’s thinking about needling him further. And sure enough, once she puts her empty glass on the coffee table, she says, “So is this your plan, then?” She gestures at the boys on the sofa. “Binge drinking every night because your boyfriend never showed up?”

Charles raises his chin. “It’s only been a few days—”

“Four,” Angel cuts in.

“— and I’m certain he’ll be here soon,” Charles finishes.

“And what if he does show up—and he wants to kill you?” Angel says. “Didn’t you say he has a soul now?” She does a sort of whole-body shake. “Weird.”

“A soul doesn’t automatically make someone a paragon of morality,” Charles counters.

Angel raises her hands in surrender. “Look, I don’t know the guy, OK?” She smirks as she adds, “I’m just saying—if he doesn’t turn out to be the man of your undead dreams, I’m going to be more than a little worried for the twink population of Manhattan.”

Charles glares at her. “He will show up.”

Angel gives him a pitying look as she stands and smooths down her short leather dress. “Whatever you say, honey.”

Charles bites back a response as she walks away. She didn’t look in Erik’s mind—only he did. Yes, there’s the pesky matter of Erik’s soul, but he doesn’t see why it should be an issue. He thinks back to Shaw’s words as he closes his eyes again. Difficult to affix, but easy to remove…

And then he’s startled awake by the sound of a doorbell. He glances to his left: the remaining pair of boys are gone. So, too, are Azazel, Angel, and Janos; when he glances at his watch, he realizes several hours have passed. He really must have been in a state earlier.

He clearly spends too long trying to orient himself, because the bell rings again. This time, he properly focuses his telepathy on the ringer—and when he realizes who it is, he nearly leaps off the sofa, heading across the living area and into the foyer in a few quick strides.

Because standing on the other side of the door is Erik: Erik, with his leather jacket and perfect cheekbones and dark hair just long enough to tug. Erik, who looks exactly like he always does, but also utterly different—he's still a vampire, but now Charles is, too. He’s staring at Charles with a strange expression, almost a frown, but his mind is screaming out something else entirely.

“Hello, darling,” Charles says, echoing the first time they were reunited. “Would you like to come in?”

Erik only hesitates for a split second, and then he steps forward and kisses him.

*

The Watchers Council always manages to have impeccable timing—Raven’s Cruciamentum, by the way, coincided with the first day of her period—so of course the new Cecil shows up right after Erik disappears.

Except he isn’t a Cecil at all: she’s a woman. And American.

“Moira MacTaggert,” she says, holding out a hand. “Your new Watcher.”

Raven is still gaping as she shakes her hand. “I thought you guys were all British.”

Moira gives her a wry smile. “They made an exception.” After a long beat passes, she cranes her neck to peer past Raven’s shoulder before she says, “So can I come in?”

Setting aside the woman part and the American part, Moira MacTaggert is nothing like the Cecils. She’s got short dark hair and giant brown eyes, and as far as Raven can tell, she’s not wearing any tweed. Raven is about to introduce her to the guys, but Moira puts a hand on her upper arm and says, “Actually, can we talk in private first?”

Raven takes her to a room at the far end of the ground floor that has an especially large number of occult things in it. If Moira is a Watcher, she’ll probably feel right at home.

“The first thing I should tell you is I’m not actually a Watcher,” Moira says. “Not really, anyway.”

Raven blinks. “Did they literally run out of Watchers?”

Moira laughs. “Sorry, I should clarify—the Council did officially make me a Watcher about two weeks ago. But for the past decade, I’ve been a practicing physician. I worked with the Council when supernatural cases came through my hospital.”

“OK, so you quit being a doctor to…be a Watcher?” Raven says slowly, baffled. “Does the Council give super good benefits, or…?”

Moira smiles in a kind of sad way. “I worked with specific Watchers, actually. And before he was put under house arrest, the person I worked with most often was Charles.”

Raven’s stomach twists at the mention of his name—but then she steps back a few beats in the conversation. “Two weeks ago—that’s when they found out Charles was a vampire?”

Moira nods. “They approached me and explained what had happened. They were getting reports from New York—”

“Two weeks ago? And they didn’t bother to tell us in their stupid letter?” Raven flops back against the sofa cushions. “Or how about the phone—do they have a phone? Do they know we have a phone?”

“Please don’t ask me to explain any of their ways,” Moira says, smiling as she shakes her head. “Even after all these years, I find them frustratingly opaque.”

Raven deflates a little. None of the Cecils insulted the Council in the first five minutes. OK, so maybe “frustratingly opaque” isn’t really an insult, though it kind of sounds like it would be if Charles said it—

“I honestly don’t know if I’m the most qualified person to handle this situation,” Moira continues. “I’ve seen a lot of things over the years, but I’m not trained to…train you.”

“I’m trained,” Raven says flatly.

Moira does that sad smile again. “They thought that maybe someone who knew Charles would be helpful here. It’s been years, but we used to be pretty—”

“But he’s not ‘Charles,’” Raven cuts in. “It’s just a demon in Charles’s body—”

“Well…” Moira makes a vague gesture. “Vampirism is a little more complicated than that.”

“Ugh!” Raven says, throwing up her hands. “Why does everyone keep saying that?”

Moira doesn’t argue with her, though. She puts her hand on Raven’s knee and says, “Even if I’m not the most qualified person to handle this situation, I really want to help you solve it.”

Raven stares at her. “What does ‘solve it’ mean? Killing Charles?”

Moira’s mouth pinches for a second, but then she puts on a determined expression. “If that’s what we need to do, then yes—and I’ll do what I can to assist you.”

Raven looks down at Moira’s hand, which is still on her knee. She has really pretty nails, kind of long and oval-shaped, with dark red polish. It’s basically the color of blood.

“I like your nails,” she tells Moira, nodding at them.

“Thanks,” Moira says brightly, picking up her hand and wiggling her fingers. “I’m letting them grow out now that I don’t have to constantly put on latex gloves—” She leans in and says teasingly, “Unless there’s something about vampire slaying that I don’t know?”

Raven laughs, even as she’s still eyeing Moira’s nails. She never bothers to paint hers—there are so many opportunities for chips when you’re constantly whacking the undead—but maybe she should start. Sean paints his nails sometimes, but it’s not the same. Sometimes she thinks he makes them look bad on purpose.

It suddenly occurs to her that she’s literally spent eight years living with only men. And not just one or two of them—a whole van’s worth! She looks down at Moira’s boots, which are very cute; she wonders where Moira buys her clothes.

“Well,” Moira says, hooking her thumb in the direction of the door. “I heard you have a real motley crew living here. Want to introduce me?”

Raven can’t read minds, but she can basically guess everyone’s thoughts as she takes Moira around the house. They mostly seem similar to her first thoughts: A woman? An American? The only person who diverges is Sean, who immediately does what Raven supposes is his version of flirting. She tries not to roll her eyes in front of them, but honestly! Moira’s probably at least thirty and also really beautiful—as if she’d ever go for a twenty-one-year-old stoner who’s also a banshee.

“And that’s the whole…motley crew,” Raven tells her as they leave Hank’s lab. “Do you want to see the—”

“I assume Erik is sleeping right now?” Moira interrupts. She glances at her watch. “Sunset isn’t for a couple more hours…”

“You know about Erik?” Raven asks, trying not to panic. “Does the Watchers Council know about Erik?”

Moira laughs. “Calm down—yes, the Council knows about Erik. Charles wrote them when he came to live here. Apparently they wanted to study him—ensouled vampires are so rare—but Charles nipped that idea in the bud.”

“OK,” Raven says as her heart rate slows. “That’s…good.”

“But I actually knew Erik before he had a soul,” Moira continues. “I was with Charles the night they met.” She adds dryly, “I thought he was hot, but also a dick.”

Raven lets out a surprised laugh. “The soul hasn’t changed either of those things.”

Moira laughs, too, and gestures for them to keep walking down the hallway. “I’m looking forward to being reacquainted with him. I’ve never met a vampire with a soul before…”

Raven feels a twist of guilt, because she knows that when the sun sets, Erik won’t magically appear. If Moira had been yet another Cecil, she’d lie about it as long as she could—she doesn’t owe the Watchers Council anything. But she already likes Moira a lot, and Moira seems to like Charles a lot—at least, the version of Charles she used to be friends with. Raven decides that she needs to hear the truth.

“Moira…” she says slowly. “There’s something you should know.”

Moira stops and turns to her, looking expectant. “What’s up?”

“I can show you Erik’s room right now, but he isn’t there,” Raven tells her. “And…” She takes a deep breath. “I think that means we have a problem.”

*

Charles always slept like the dead—but now, he’s bringing new meaning to the expression.

It’s half past four in the afternoon per the clock on the nightstand, and Erik has been watching Charles sleep for some time now. The most notable thing he’s observed, of course, is the fact that Charles’s chest no longer rises and falls.

Eventually, he decides to sit up to study Charles properly. The windows are totally blacked out, but a bit of light is spilling from beyond the entryway to the bedroom suite. Charles looks even paler than usual against the dark sheets—black sheets, in fact, because this whole place is a fucking cliché. Charles seems to find Shaw’s bordello decorating style funny; Charles apparently finds a lot of things funny these days.

Right now, he’s flat on his back, limbs outstretched and cock resting on his right thigh. He looks like a work of art. Erik had worried that months of imprisonment might have left him half-starved, but it doesn’t seem like he was skipping any meals—he looks supple and firm, an exquisite balance of curves and angles. Maybe Erik should feel a little bad that he’s so pleased Charles was turned looking like this, but he doesn’t. It’s a perfect body to spend an eternity in.

Charles stirs a little then, slowly blinking awake. When he meets Erik’s gaze, he smiles as he says, “I see you still enjoy watching me sleep.”

“Dead or alive, it remains the cheapest few hours of entertainment around,” Erik quips.

Charles laughs and reaches out to tug Erik downwards until their lips meet. Erik hasn’t yet decided whether he really misses the warmth. Even ice cold, Charles is just as skilled—he proved as much for hours last night, and from the way he immediately deepens the kiss, his hands inching down Erik’s back, it seems he’s interested in proving it again.

It’s not like their relationship was ever only about the physical, but that was certainly…one of its key components. After all, back when they first met, it had been the main driver—and the reason for the series of unfortunate events that followed.

Erik had heard rumors that soul restoration could come with conditions: specifically, a no-sex rule, which seemed like adding insult to injury when you were already being re-saddled with guilt, shame, and a conscience. He didn’t mention this to Charles when they were reunited, hoping it was yet another old vampire’s tale as Charles eagerly led him up to his bedroom.

The relief he felt afterwards, watching Charles passed out on his giant bed and feeling pretty certain his soul was still intact, almost overpowered everything else.

In the here and now, they kiss languidly, Charles’s wandering hands prompting a predictable stirring low in Erik’s core. They may be cold on the outside, but it still feels like heat inside. Charles is the one to break the kiss, pushing Erik off of him—a seemingly light touch, but there’s so much strength beneath it that Erik is momentarily caught off guard. Since he arrived here last night, every little vampire change has been startling, things that have been utterly natural to him for decades now seeming so foreign in Charles.

Charles grins up at him for a moment, looking mischievous, and then he deftly maneuvers them until he’s rolled over on top, pressing Erik down against the mattress and straddling his hips. It’s a familiar position, obviously—but if Erik thinks for a moment about over-warm Charles, those thoughts flit away as quickly as they came when Charles squeezes his thighs.

“God,” Charles says, writhing a little, and then he gives Erik a pointed look. “I still can’t believe you didn’t tell me.”

Erik frowns. “Didn’t tell you what?”

Charles wraps a hand around Erik’s quickly hardening cock. “About how vampire sex is vastly superior to human sex.”

“Do you know how long it’s been since I had sex as a human?” Erik says flatly, but then he lets out a hiss as Charles gives him a wicked smile and uses his other hand to tease at his balls. Erik tips his head back against the pillow, closing his eyes as he adds, “Besides, I didn’t want to make you jealous.”

Charles laughs. “You should have said something. Maybe I would have been more receptive to the turning conversation.”

Erik opens his eyes at that. “Charles.”

“What?” Charles says innocently, starting to grind down against Erik’s thighs as he continues to stroke his cock. “I’m turned now. No sense crying over spilled blood.”

“You’re being very flippant about—ah.” Erik gasps, and Charles grins.

“Oh, let’s not be ponderous first thing in the afternoon,” Charles says, drawing out the syllables of the word. “I either want to fuck you or be fucked by you. Dealer’s choice—just choose quickly, please.”

Erik stares up at him, his serious train of thought increasingly blotted out by Charles’s talented hand and the sensation against his thighs. He came here intending to—well, to be fair, this is exactly what he came here intending to do. But he thought that at some point, they might be able to actually talk about what happened. Instead, Charles has changed the subject at every turn, generally right back to sex.

Still, Erik isn’t about to say no to that offer. “How about just like that?” he tells Charles, gesturing to where he’s seated. “You can ride me.”

Charles’s wicked smile returns. “Your wish is my command.”

Erik was turned so long ago that it’s hard to remember a lot of those early years, but he has a clear memory of the first time he slept with someone after becoming a vampire. The lack of fluids was confusing, but the heightened senses made everything dramatically more potent (and conveniently, there was no need for lube—though no one could ever explain that one). Before long, it was stranger to sleep with a human than anything else, but adjusting to all the messy limitations of Charles’s human body had been a challenge Erik had been happy to take on.

Now those memories are feeling very distant, as Charles lowers himself onto his cock in a way Erik might describe as “torturously slow.” Charles is making utterly indecent noises, gripping Erik’s hips as he fully envelops him. The tightness, the sensation, the feel of Charles’s cold fingertips—it’s almost too much. Erik grips the sheets, hands scrabbling for purchase.

“See?” Charles says as he starts to ride him, the rhythm still maddeningly sedate. “Vastly superior.”

“Charles,” Erik bites out, bunching the sheets. “You’re going to kill me.”

Charles laughs loudly and rolls his hips, and Erik whimpers.

“You’re already dead, darling,” Charles tells him. “We both are.”

Would he have turned Charles someday? It feels pointless to linger over the question now. Not that Erik is lingering over much of anything at the moment, totally overwhelmed by the sensation of Charles riding him, and the vision of Charles above him, hair falling against his forehead, his body luminously pale in the dim light, biting his lip as he strokes his own cock. Erik only distantly registers the moment Charles gets himself off, because he’s too far gone himself—and then, the whole world whites out for a moment, an explosion of pleasure rocketing up and down his body.

Charles is still laughing as he collapses onto Erik’s chest. They lay there for a while, gradually coming down, and then Charles pulls himself off Erik’s softened cock and rolls over onto the mattress beside him.

“Only five o’clock,” Charles moans, pressing his face into the pillow. “Hours until sunset.”

Two hours, to be precise—Erik can feel it. And now, he reminds himself, Charles can feel it, too.

“Probably time to finally get out of bed, then,” Erik says, swinging his legs over the side of the mattress. He squints across the room; his clothing seems to have wound up in some truly surprising places.

“Two hours is forever,” Charles says, flipping onto his back. “I’m hungry now.”

Erik gives him a look before he bends to pick up his underwear. “You ate before we fell asleep.”

It had been less than an hour before sunrise—cutting it close for your average vampire, but Charles had tapped his temple and assured him he’d have no trouble finding a quick snack. Erik stayed in bed while he was gone, trying not to think about how troubling the idea of a telepathic vampire really was. Shaw had been strong enough to endure for centuries, but he still had to overpower his victims the old-fashioned way.

But when Charles returned only twenty minutes later, flushed from the kill and somehow even hornier than before, Erik was suddenly deeply uninterested in bringing up the telepathy question.

“I’m just so hungry all the time,” Charles complains as Erik is retrieving his jeans.

“That’s because you’re basically a teenager,” Erik tells him, amused. He glances back towards the bed and reconsiders. “Or maybe a kitten.”

“Oh, I know!” Charles says, sitting up suddenly. “We’ll order delivery.”

Erik can’t say he’s particularly happy to see Azazel again, seeing as the demon played an instrumental role in some of the worst moments of his life. But watching him happily take orders from Charles nearly gives him whiplash.

“Oh, he didn’t even need to be convinced,” Charles says, waving a dismissive hand. “Neither did Angel or Janos—you’ll meet them later.”

“So you’re aiming for what, Vampire King of Manhattan?” Erik says skeptically.

Charles laughs, brushing a hand across his cheek. “I may have inherited Shaw’s super strength, but I have zero interest in furthering his ideas about vampire supremacism. Such a bore—” He slides the hand down towards Erik’s chest and taps it lightly. “Just think of all the fun we’ll have instead.”

“Fun,” Erik repeats, recalling the reports of Charles’s antics along the West Side this past week.

Charles smiles and turns to head into the main living area—and Erik is struck afresh by how truly stupid Shaw’s apartment is. The only thing he’ll give it is the blackout treatments, which have encased the massive room in cool, dark shade. Charles also seems to be dressing to match: he’s in a loose black ensemble now, the pale vee of his neck and chest on full display. He sits on one of the leather chairs, crossing one leg primly over the other. Erik sighs and follows him, slouching on the opposite sofa.

“I’m sensing discordance,” Charles says, his lips quirking upwards.

“‘Fun’ for me is—” Erik gestures towards him. “We can fuck all night every night if you want. But you know I don’t take human victims anymore—even ones I can leave alive.”

“Right,” Charles says. He sighs and flops back a bit in the chair, looking dramatically bored. “Your soul.”

“Yeah, my soul,” Erik shoots back. “The one I got restored for you.”

Charles waves a dismissive hand again. “Don’t worry—I think it should be easy to deal with.”

Erik stares at him. “Deal with?”

“Trust me: you won’t miss it,” Charles continues. He smiles widely, showing his teeth. “I don’t.”

“Charles—” Erik begins.

“Oh, spare me the pearl-clutching,” Charles says. “I know you toyed with the idea of turning me for years. Shaw simply got tired of waiting for you to do it.”

Erik opens his mouth to reply, but then Azazel pops back into the room. He’s got his arms around a squirming young woman, one hand clamped over her mouth. She looks suitably terrified.

“Ah, lovely,” Charles says, rising from his chair. “Thanks ever so much, Azazel.”

Azazel smirks and nods, and once Charles pulls the girl from his arms, he pops out of sight.

Charles spins the woman around so she’s facing Erik, immediately overpowering her struggling as he clutches her tight. Her eyes are wide as she meets Erik’s gaze, like she’s pleading with him to do something. But Erik only watches, entranced, as Charles’s features shift, his fangs protracting. He tilts the woman’s neck to fully expose it, bending in slightly—and then he straightens again, glancing back at Erik and raising his eyebrows. “Unless you’d like to share?”

Erik told him he didn’t take human victims literally two minutes ago—and, of course, Charles has known as much for years. But he doesn’t say anything, too wrapped up in watching Charles’s finger trace along the woman’s long, unblemished neck.

“Go to sleep, love,” Charles says, and the woman droops heavily in his arms. He picks her up like she weighs nothing, setting her gently on the sofa next to Erik and sitting down on her other side. He props her up slightly, so one side of her neck is easily within his reach—and the other side is easily within Erik’s.

“All the fun,” Charles echoes, smiling at him. His fangs glint in the low light. “And we’ll do it together.”

He buries his teeth in the woman’s neck, letting out a low guttural sound of pleasure. Erik watches, still entranced, and something rises up within him—something he hasn’t truly felt since the moment his soul was restored.

He looks at the woman’s neck again, and at Charles’s head bobbing as he drinks. His fangs protract, and he leans in, reaching for Charles’s hand resting on the woman’s breast. Charles pulls back for a moment, his lips smeared with blood, and as he grasps Erik’s hand, he grins.

*

Erik doesn’t come back to the house when the sun sets.

Raven stays up super late that evening, hoping he’ll show eventually. She also texts him a bunch of times, but they all turn green, and when she calls him, it goes straight to voicemail. Either his phone died or he’s turned it off, and she’s pretty sure she knows which one it is.

Moira returns bright and early the next morning, dressed in a chic orange jacket over a short brown dress; she’s also got a leather bag over one shoulder, and a tray of coffees in each hand. She’s smiling brightly, but when she catches sight of Raven’s face, her smile droops.

“I didn’t know what everyone likes,” Moira explains as she sets the coffees on the kitchen table, adding with a wry smile, “I erred on the sweeter side for a bunch of teenagers.”

“Only Hank and Raven are teenagers,” Sean says loftily, but when he pulls off the lid of one that clearly has whipped cream and caramel sauce on top, he takes that for himself.

Raven grabs the pumpkin spice (yeah, so she enjoys basic fall stuff! She kind of feels like the Slayer is entitled to that) and leans against the kitchen island.

“All right,” Moira tells them. “Catch me up on the Erik situation.”

Of course Erik could be dead in a ditch somewhere, but they all agree that it seems more likely that he went down to the city to see Charles—or, since it’s been two nights now, to stay with Charles. It’s also possible Charles was responsible for Erik being dead in a ditch somewhere, but Moira shakes her head when they bring it up.

“There are certainly plenty of cases of people being turned and immediately slaughtering their loved ones,” she explains. “But it’s a common misconception that vampires are totally separate beings from the humans who inhabited their body in life. It’s just as likely that Charles is still in love with Erik. In fact, being turned may have twisted that love into something even more obsessive.”

“Yeah, but they were already pretty freakin’ obsessed with each other,” Raven mutters, rolling her eyes. “So what would that mean?”

“I think it’s safe to say we’ll find them together,” Moira says. “The question is: What’s an ensouled vampire doing with one so…problematic that the Watchers Council called an emergency meeting?”

“Problematic,” Raven repeats.

“Maybe Erik’s trying to figure out how to kill him,” Alex suggests.

“Dude,” Sean says, looking offended. “He’s totally in love with Charles. You actually think he’s gonna murder him?”

“He was in love with human Charles,” Alex shoots back.

“Right,” Moira says crisply, opening her bag and pulling out a big stack of things—booklets, papers, even what looks like a diary. “I think our biggest variable here is what exactly resouling entails.” She sifts through the pile and pulls out one of the booklets, tapping the cover. “I spent yesterday evening reading a paper Charles wrote on the subject—”

“A paper about Erik?” Alex interrupts.

Moira shakes her head. “It was more general, though there were some fairly specific references that suggest he was using him as a source. He published it last year.”

“Paper?” Raven wrinkles her nose. “Is there some kind of Watcher academic journal?”

“There is,” Moira says matter-of-factly.

“Charles actually loaned me some back copies,” Hank chimes in. “There was this one study—”

“OK, OK,” Raven interrupts. “I don’t know why I was surprised that a bunch of nerds found a way to be even nerdier.” She looks back at Moira. “What did it say?”

“First, there isn’t a lot of research on it because it’s so rare,” Moira explains. “Most vampires would never choose to do it, and some that have had it done to them for whatever reason didn’t survive the process. But even between the successes and the failures, we’re still talking about a couple dozen recorded cases over centuries.”

“Great, so Erik’s super special,” Raven says sarcastically.

“Well, yes,” Moira says in that same matter-of-fact tone. “I will say that the most interesting part of Charles’s paper wasn’t the history, but about what the ‘soul’ entails. Obviously your standard vampire lacks a conscience. But as we were just discussing, the idea that the vampiric self is some totally separate entity from the human self is a misconception. It’s not like some random demon sets up shop in your body—you yourself are being transformed.”

Raven remembers standing in this kitchen that first night Darwin told them about Charles, basically saying some random demon had set up shop in Charles’s body—Erik was the one who insisted it was “more complicated than that.” She doesn’t understand how there’s anything left of the real Charles in the vampire they saw the other night. But then, she also remembers when Charles said that Erik with a soul wasn’t all that different from Erik without a soul.

“…and the idea of a—Raven, are you listening?”

Raven’s attention snaps back to Moira. She’s making a face that’s weirdly similar to the one Charles always makes when Raven drifts off. Maybe she really was meant to be a Watcher.

“Sorry,” she says. “What were you saying?”

“That Erik obviously cared enough about Charles to go through the trial of getting his soul restored,” Moira tells her. “But Charles’s paper also suggests that the soul-to-no-soul spectrum isn’t a binary.”

Raven blinks at her. “Huh?”

“She means that soul or not, Erik might have already gone back over to the dark side,” Darwin says. “I mean, he was always kind of on the grey side…”

“Great,” Raven says. “So now I have to kill Erik, too?”

Moira is silent for a long moment, but then she only says, “Why don’t we try to find him first?”

It turns out that all Watchers, even brand-new and untrained ones, like to give people homework. Moira asks Hank to go through Charles’s extensive database of spreadsheets to look for soul-related stuff, and she gives Darwin the title of a book that’s supposedly the source for soul spells, though she mentions that it’s very rare, so it might be hard to track down. Alex and Sean wind up with good chunks of the papers and booklets; Sean eagerly offers to take even more, and Raven debates telling Moira that Sean is only helpful at research when he’s stoned and just happens to get fixated on the right passage.

Luckily, Raven’s homework always tends to be some variation on “keep punching things.” Hopped up on pumpkin spice latte, she heads for the gym, Moira trailing behind her.

“So are you up for going down to Manhattan this evening?” Moira asks. “Darwin mentioned he was working on his tracking spells. That might save us some time finding Charles and Erik.”

Raven looks up from her stretching. “Are you asking if I’m psychologically prepared to kill both my parental-figures-turned-evil-vampires tonight?”

Moira raises her eyebrows. “You thought of Erik as a parental figure? No offense, but that was not the energy I got from him when we met.”

Raven looks at her coolly as she says, “Well, you knew him before he had a soul. Maybe there’s a bigger difference between the two than you thought.” She bends again, pressing her hands flat against the floor, so she doesn’t have to look at Moira.

After a beat, Moira says, “I’m sorry, Raven. I know this has to be really hard for you.”

“Everything’s hard for me.” Raven wraps her hands around the backs of her thighs. “I’m the Slayer.”

“I just mean—”

“Look, it’s fine,” Raven snaps, straightening to look at her again. “They’re vampires. I kill vampires. We don’t need to make this complicated.”

Moira is thankfully silent after that, and Raven crosses over to the pull-up bar. She jumps up and does ten reps, then another ten, trying to push out all her thoughts about Charles and Erik and vampires with or without souls.

When she drops back to the floor, Moira is watching her with an apologetic look on her face. Raven suddenly feels bad—Moira isn’t a Cecil for about nine thousand reasons, but one of them is that she actually seems to care about how Raven feels.

“Do you…” Raven gestures to the pull-up bar. “Want to help me train?”

Moira looks surprised, but then she glances down at her outfit. “I guess I’m not really dressed for it, huh?” She lifts one of her boots, which goes almost up to her knee, and wiggles her foot. “I’m not dressed for a Manhattan stake-out either—I should go back to the hotel and change before we leave.” She glances at her watch. “What time would you want to go, maybe nine? Or—”

“You should stay here,” Raven blurts out. “We have, like, dozens of bedrooms.”

Moira looks even more surprised, but then she gives Raven a small smile and says, “All right. If you wouldn’t mind.”

“It would make things way easier,” Raven says, shrugging. “You know…to do Watcher stuff?”

Moira nods. “Why don’t I go get my things and check out of the hotel, then? I should be back in a few hours.”

“Did the Council put you up in some haunted-mansion bed and breakfast?”

“A Residence Inn, actually,” Moira says dryly. “In White Plains.”

“Probably has a good breakfast buffet,” Raven counters.

Moira laughs, and then she gestures upwards. “I guess this is my opportunity to stay in a haunted mansion, huh?”

Raven’s stomach catches a little remembering the very first time she set foot in this house. But she forces a smile as she says, “Well, we don’t actually have any ghost residents yet.”

“That you know of!” Moira calls out, heading towards the door.

Raven stands in the middle of the mat for a long time after Moira leaves, thinking too many thoughts even as she tries not to think at all. She’s full of energy; she could do another hundred pull-ups easily. But instead she finds herself marching to the far end of the gym and punching in the passcode to the adjoining room.

She flips on the light switch to reveal row after row of weapons. On a nearby shelf, there’s the antique crossbow collection; on the next shelf over, all the modern ones. There’s a limit to what you can get away with carrying around New York City—but she can bring a backpack.

*

If Charles already found being a vampire exceedingly enjoyable, having Erik at his side is truly the icing on the cake.

If he’s being honest, Erik was a bit of a wild card at first. Sure, their sexual reunion was spectacular, to put it mildly, and he knew Erik felt the same. But when Charles placed that woman between them on the sofa, he’d been half-convinced that Erik would merely watch him drink—despite the fact that his mind was clearly telegraphing that he wanted to join in.

Even back in his pre-soul days, Erik was a bit odd about his victims, preferring to leave them weakened but alive. Erik liked to say it was to avoid the suspicion of the authorities, not to mention the annoyance of having to clean up a body. Encumbered with a soul, Erik had switched entirely to bagged blood—but Charles had idly wondered over the years if that was mostly for his own benefit. Human Charles certainly wouldn’t have wanted to watch Erik kill people; human Charles was very disapproving of murder.

Thankfully, human Charles was eventually murdered himself. And whatever hang-ups Erik was currently harboring about being a vampire, they seemed to melt away on that sofa. He’d placed his hand on Charles’s, and when Charles had looked up at him, Erik’s fangs were out, too.

When the sun finally set that evening, Charles had insisted they go out—for laughs, he suggested the Meatpacking District. Erik had rolled his eyes, but he still relented.

Charles also had Azazel join them for convenience’s sake, even though Erik was still harboring vengeful feelings towards him. He held a very clear vision of Azazel and Shaw whisking a still-human Charles into thin air, seemingly taking him away forever. Whenever he caught Erik thinking about it, Charles wanted to remind him that he was right there, obviously not gone forever; he suspected it was going to take Erik quite some time to really adjust to the fact, but luckily, they had all the time in the world.

Wildcard status downgraded, there were still a few wrinkles. It didn’t escape Charles’s notice that he did the entirety of the hunting that first night: Erik drank his fill, but he didn’t initiate any of their encounters. It was still intoxicating to share a victim with him, and it wasn’t even midnight by the time Charles was asking Azazel to pop them back to the flat; if they’d had to bother with a car, Charles was quite certain they would have wound up fucking in the back seat.

Killing for the first half of the night, fucking for the second—maybe the routine might get boring someday, but Charles can’t fathom that right now. As they head out for night two, he’s hoping for a similar pattern. Once he figures out how to free Erik of his soul, things will be perfect.

He glances back at Erik, then at the pair of boys walking along Tenth Avenue between them. Quite handsome, these two, and utterly convinced they’re all about to have group sex. If Charles wasn’t so hungry, he honestly might consider it as a bit of a first course. But as it stands, he’s too impatient to even bother luring them back to the flat.

“Hang on a moment,” he says, gesturing for the group to turn onto a side street. “I have to pick up one thing on the way.”

But the second they’re around the corner, he grabs the blond one, transforming as he pushes him up against the metal grate of a closed shopfront. The boy lets out a shriek, so Charles claps a hand over his mouth. As he opens wide to show off his fangs, the boy’s eyes grow even rounder, and he gnashes his teeth, trying to bite Charles’s hand.

“Don’t worry,” Charles tells him, tilting his head. “This will be nice and quick.”

He buries his fangs in the boy’s neck, pressing his body even harder against the grate. The boy grasps at Charles’s shirt, but after a few moments, his arms drop to his sides and the panic in his mind starts to dim. His blood is delicious, fresh and warm with a strong undercurrent of some sort of stimulant; almost instantaneously, Charles can feel the latter pin-balling through his system. It makes him feel invincible.

When he finally pulls out his fangs, he lets go and the boy drops to the ground in a heap. He turns to Erik, his whole body buzzing magnificently, but the feeling is dampened in an instant. Erik is just standing there, his face smooth. His grip on the brown-haired one is tight, but the boy is clearly still alive.

“That one was for you, you know,” Charles says, frowning as he nods in their direction.

Erik opens his mouth, and then he shuts it again. After a moment, he says, “I thought you might still be hungry.”

The line might have worked if Charles hadn’t been a telepath—but he can clearly see all of Erik’s tangled feelings about killing people. It’s tiresome. He sighs and gestures for Erik to pass the boy over; as Erik lets go, the boy tries to make a run for it, but Charles catches him instantly.

“So sorry to keep you waiting,” he says, and then he bites down, and the boy yells even louder than his friend.

Charles rolls his eyes, silencing the boy with his mind and ordering him to stop struggling for good measure. He only drinks a little before he pulls out and gestures to Erik.

“There,” he says, feeling a little petulant. “I got him started for you.”

Erik watches him for a long moment, but eventually, he sighs and his features shift. Even when he was human, Charles always thought Erik looked remarkably sexy with his fangs out. He looks even better with his fangs on the boy’s neck.

When he’s finished, Erik lets the corpse drop onto the other one. He gestures with a skeptical look. “You want to just leave them here?”

“Of course not,” Charles says briskly. He shifts back—it’s hard to whistle with the fangs.

“Reporting for clean-up duty,” Azazel says as he pops onto the sidewalk in front of them. He smirks as he takes in the pair of bodies on the ground. “Let’s try two at once.”

He grabs each of them by an arm, and then all three vanish.

“Doesn’t he find it exhausting?” Erik says. “Given your body count every night…”

Charles waves him off. “Oh, I’m certain he enjoys it. Demons, you know.”

“Where does he even put them?”

“He likes to pretend it’s a secret, but—” Charles taps his temple. “They wind up all over, really. Sometimes he goes halfway across the world. He especially likes dropping them in the ocean.” He steps forward, running a hand up Erik’s arm and squeezing his bicep. “How are you feeling?”

Erik shakes his head, looking a little dazed. “I think those boys took something.”

“I know,” Charles says, stepping even closer until their bodies are flush together. “Isn’t it marvelous?”

Erik bends down to capture his lips, and Charles writhes against him, pressing their groins together. Erik moans in his mouth and maneuvers him towards the shop’s grate, shoving him against the metal with a clatter.

“You want to fuck right here on West Fifty-Whatever Street?” Charles murmurs, palming at Erik’s hardening cock through his jeans.

Erik hisses, briefly pressing his face against Charles’s neck. With his fangs still out, the tips skirt deliciously along Charles’s skin. When Erik pulls back, he says, “Can you hold your focus enough to make us invisible?”

“Oh, who cares?” Charles writhes against him again. “Let them watch.”

Erik unzips Charles’s trousers and wraps his hand around his cock—and perhaps if the the sensation of it all wasn’t so all-encompassing, Erik stroking him and his fangs nipping at his neck, heightened even further by the boys’ drugs coursing through his system, Charles wouldn’t have been so distracted that he missed the collection of approaching minds.

And then someone clears their throat, and a voice Charles hasn’t heard in years says loudly, “Well, he’s not dead in a ditch.”

Both he and Erik freeze—and there’s the unmistakable sound of a crossbow being cocked.

Charles peers around Erik’s shoulder. It’s Raven on the crossbow, of course—and beside her, inexplicably, is Moira MacTaggert. Darwin and Alex are bringing up the rear, each of them holding a large wooden cross.

“Moira!” he says brightly. “What brings you back to this side of the Atlantic?”

“She’s my Watcher now,” Raven says. She’s glaring at both of them, and since Erik is literally blocking his body, Charles can’t tell who she’s aiming for; he wonders if she’d be able to hit them both at once. But his interest is more piqued by her words than her physical threat.

“Moira the Watcher?” he says, raising his eyebrows. “That’s quite the surprise.”

“Charles,” Erik says in a low voice. “Can we not do the small talk routine while we’re…” He nods downwards. “…like this?”

“Yes, of course,” Charles tells him. “But you’re the one with your hand down my trousers.”

Erik makes a grumbling noise and extricates his hand. Charles’s erection is already fading—the sight of his former charge aiming a deadly weapon in their direction is a bit of a turn-off, all things considered. Erik shifts back, fangs retreating, before he turns to face the rest of the group.

“MacTaggert,” he says, his tone cold.

“Lehnsherr,” she says flatly. “I see you haven’t changed a bit.”

Erik opens his mouth, but Charles places a hand on his chest and steps forward.

“Moira,” he says. “What has it been, eight years now? You’re looking as lovely as always.”

Moira folds her arms. “And you’re looking like a vampire.”

Charles laughs. “I’d like to think that means ‘better than ever,’ but, of course, tastes vary.”

“Where have you been?” Raven says. “I tried calling you, like, fifty times.”

It takes Charles a moment to realize she’s talking to Erik. Internally, he can sense her trembling with nerves, but her grip on the crossbow is rock-steady. He allows himself a moment of pride seeing the results of their years of relentless training, even if it’s clear now that she’s aiming the crossbow at him.

“I was…” Erik gestures vaguely. “Here.”

“So you’re evil now, too?” Raven snaps.

Erik gives her a cool look. “I still have my soul.”

Charles lets out a peal of laughter, patting Erik’s chest again. “That wasn’t her question, love.”

“The real question,” Moira says, raising her voice, “was whether you two were together again.” She pointedly glances towards their lower halves. “And I think we have a clear answer.”

Charles takes a step closer to them, then another, watching the way Raven minutely adjusts the crossbow’s aim out of the corner of his eye. Moira really does look smashing—but then, he’d always found her quite appealing. Back when he was her contact at the Council, he would flirt with her shamelessly, even as they both knew it was all talk: she was a doctor and he was a teenager, not to mention that she was infinitely too sensible to fall for those kinds of lines.

Now, he’s close enough to touch her—so he does, picking up her hand and bringing it to his lips. She gasps, yanking it back immediately. Raven steps towards them, and at this close range, Charles is sure someone far less skilled than a Slayer could hit his heart in an instant.

“You really should have kept your phone on,” he says to Erik without turning around. “You could have saved them a trip.”

“That’s not the only reason we’re here,” Raven says.

“Ah, yes,” Charles says, taking a step back and planting his hands in his pockets. He turns towards Erik, who’s watching him carefully, before spinning back to face her. “It’s not often you bring your favorite crossbow to Manhattan, Raven. From the outside, it would appear that you’re here to kill me.”

“From the outside?” Moira echoes.

“I’m sure they must have told you that becoming a vampire sent my telepathy into overdrive,” Charles tells her. “Back when we knew each other, I’d really have to focus to tell what you were thinking. But now…”

Charles already has a light touch on all their minds—at this point, doing so with everyone around him is as easy as not-breathing—but he takes a moment to dip in properly, and then he smiles.

“Let’s see,” he says conversationally. “Alex thinks Erik’s secretly planning to kill me. Darwin knows he’s not. Moira, in spite of herself, actually finds me far more attractive than before, and Raven—” He turns to Raven, shaking his head. “Arrived here believing she could never kill me point-blank, but has steadily been changing her mind over the course of the past few minutes.”

Moira sputters. “I do not find you—”

“Oh, and Erik, of course!” Charles interrupts, stepping towards him and putting an arm around his back. “He found this whole display quite arousing, and he’s hoping you’ll all leave soon so we can finally fuck properly.”

“Charles,” Erik says in a warning tone.

“Nothing to be ashamed of, darling,” Charles says, skirting his hand a little lower down Erik’s back and delighting in the response from his mind. “I’m feeling exactly the same way.”

“Well, we’re not leaving,” Raven says flatly.

“You don’t need to,” Charles tells her. “We’ll go.”

“Are you forgetting who’s holding the crossbow?” Raven shoots back. “Or are you going to call your demon friend for a ride?”

“No and no,” Charles says crisply. “I’m going to display another facet of my telepathic powers. Really, it’s quite simple—”

They all let out noises of surprise and start looking around wildly. Amid their confusion, Charles steers Erik down the sidewalk and says, “We ought to hurry.”

“You made us invisible?” Erik asks.

“Yes, but—”

And then something whooshes right in front of them, and a moment later, there’s a sound of a rubbish bin knocking over. Charles feels quite certain that if they were to pause and check what felled it, they would find the bolt of a crossbow.

“How did she do that?” Erik hisses.

“Extraordinary instincts,” Charles says. “Maybe I should have frozen them all instead…”

Charles knows that the odds of Raven actually being able to track them while they’re invisible are slim to none, but he still waits until they’re entering the lobby of the building before he makes them visible again. Once they’re alone in the lift, Erik pounces on him, pressing him against the wall with a punishing kiss.

They don’t even make it to the bedroom, shedding their clothes in a trail from the foyer to the living area. Erik shoves him onto the sofa and then sinks to his knees, his mouth immediately on Charles’s cock. Charles gasps, threading his fingers through Erik’s hair and sinking into the dual feelings of Erik’s tongue against his cock and the lust blaring from his mind. It’s overwhelming—so much so that Charles eventually tugs him back slightly by his hair.

Erik is quite the picture as he looks up from between Charles’s legs. “What?”

“I want to fuck you,” Charles says. “Now.”

Erik nearly stumbles in his eagerness to stand. Charles has always found it a blessing that they enjoy swapping as much as they do. He gets Erik on his back on the sofa, legs tucked up and hands around his calves—an equally pretty picture. Vampire sex is so much easier than human sex, he muses as he slides his cock into Erik’s hole; when his brain cells aren’t totally subsumed by desire, he really should investigate the genetic implications—there’s no reason why wholly untethering sex from reproduction would make the former so much more enjoyable. And yet.

“Charles,” Erik bites out as Charles starts to slowly pump.

“Yes, love?” Charles teases. He’s always adored torturing Erik this way. He grabs the sides of Erik’s thighs, hefting them up himself so Erik can handle his own cock. Once Erik starts stroking, Charles finally picks up the pace, and the pure pleasure from Erik’s mind almost subsumes him.

Every sensation is blasting out at once—cold skin on cold skin, Erik’s perfect body beneath his, their combined lust mixing together, sent into overdrive when Erik lets out a cry and lays back bonelessly against the sofa. It’s only a few more thrusts before Charles follows, collapsing onto Erik in a heap.

They lay like that for a long while, the lust in the air slowly cooling, until Erik eventually says, “Almost being killed is apparently arousing for both of us.”

Charles chuckles against his chest. “We were never in any real danger.”

But even as he says it, he thinks about the shift in Raven’s mind this evening. She shed a great deal of ambivalence very quickly—especially after she’d decided that Erik really had betrayed her.

“How did they even find us?” Erik asks.

Charles props himself up slightly to meet his gaze. “Darwin apparently did a tracking spell. Quite an advanced one—I was impressed.”

Erik gives him a dry look. “You’ll be praising your former charges right up until they kill you.”

Charles only laughs, pressing his face against Erik’s armpit for a moment before he lifts his head once more. “They did cut off the hunt, unfortunately—I’m going to have to go back out again.”

Erik raises an eyebrow. “No delivery?”

“Now you’re starting to get the hang of things,” Charles says, smiling.

He pushes himself upwards, clambering off Erik until he’s sitting on the edge of the sofa. Erik is still flat on his back, and he doesn’t look like he’s moving any time soon.

“It was quite nice to see them all again,” Charles says. “Especially Moira! We’d been in touch, but obviously I hadn’t seen her in years.”

“Yes,” Erik says flatly. “I noticed you were happy to see her again.”

“Go ahead—you’re always quite attractive when you’re jealous.”

Erik rolls his eyes, but he doesn’t rise to the bait.

“It seems as though the Council are somewhat concerned about me,” Charles continues. “Which is touching, really. You know, sometimes you feel like the Watcher of the active Slayer gets the short shrift—”

“How many people have you killed in the past two weeks?” Erik points out. “I think they might have been concerned even if you hadn’t formerly been one of them.”

“But still!” Charles says indulgently. “It’s nice to get that kind of recognition from your colleagues.”

“Moira as a Watcher,” Erik mutters. “Raven really did break them.”

“And it was so lovely seeing Raven again, of course!” Charles exclaims. “Remarkable skill on that crossbow, not least her willingness to actually use it.” After a beat, he sighs, leaning back a bit against Erik’s torso and resting his elbows on his stomach. He glances over to meet Erik’s gaze. “You know, it really is a shame—after all our years together.”

Erik frowns. “What’s a shame?”

Charles smiles, running a finger along one of Erik’s tremendous pectorals and punctuating it with a gentle tap. “Oh, just that we’re going to have to kill her.”

*

Erik has always thought of himself as pretty good at compartmentalizing.

Take back when he first met Charles, for example, when he was torn between his interest in biting him and his interest in fucking him. He wound up successfully putting the former aside—admittedly not for very long, but still.

He supposes he could come up with less flattering examples. Magda and their daughter come to mind. His skills at separating, setting aside, moving on—and his impatience with people who couldn’t seem to do the same—proved to be their undoing. He knows couples often split up after a child’s death, so if it hadn’t been that, it might have been something else. But that was the reason Magda eventually walked out the door, leaving a trail of invectives in her wake. “Soulless,” she’d called him then. If only she’d known what awaited him.

Really, it’s far more enjoyable to remember how he didn’t kill nineteen-year-old Charles even when he kind of wanted to. But speaking of killing teenagers—

“God, that was good,” Charles says, pushing the girl’s corpse aside—right onto the body of her friend, also dead. Charles flops back against the cushions, blood shining on his lips and teeth, and grins in Erik’s direction. “You’re sure you don’t want one? There were at least a dozen left when I grabbed these two.”

A dozen, Erik knows, means a dozen humans, telepathically put to sleep in a guest bedroom. When their numbers dwindle, Azazel will collect more, and Charles will knock them out until someone wants them. Erik had kind of thought he had a handle on the depravity of Charles’s vampiric self, but this party is pushing that understanding to new levels: it’s already been the site of a massacre, and it’s not even two o’clock.

“I’m not hungry right now,” he tells Charles. “But maybe in a bit.”

Angel saunters over to their corner of the living area and perches on the arm of Erik’s chair, a large glass of wine in her hand. She glances down at Erik and then nods in Charles’s direction as she says in an admiring tone, “Your boyfriend’s a sick fuck, did you know that?”

Charles bursts out laughing, leaning against the corpse of the girl next to him, which forces her head to droop unnaturally against her chest. Angel seems pretty drunk, but then, so does Charles, in a different way. Erik’s lost track of how many people Charles has killed tonight.

“Everyone seems to be enjoying themselves,” Erik tells her, glancing around. There are probably fifty guests here, some unknown ratio of vampires to other demons. Charles made it clear in the invitation that the only things on offer would be blood and alcohol—anyone who wanted to do some kind of ritualistic organ feeding would need to take care of that at home.

“It’s about a thousand times more fun than anything Sebastian ever did in this place,” Angel says.

Erik tries not to stiffen at the mention of Shaw; he’s still not thrilled that they’re supposed to instantly get along with the underlings of the vampire who killed them both. But Angel does have a point—Shaw’s parties were probably pretty terrible.

“We’ll absolutely be making them a regular thing,” Charles assures her. “By the way, you look quite fetching in that ensemble, Angel. I’m sorry I didn’t say so sooner.”

Erik twists his neck to glance at her outfit—a short black leather number with corset laces up the front. Angel preens a little, fluttering her wings.

“Erik looks great in leather, too,” Charles continues. “But alas, he only ever wears the jacket. Perhaps—”

“No. Leather. Pants,” Erik says flatly, and Charles falls over laughing again.

“Word on the street is you’re planning on taking down the Slayer,” Angel says casually as she sips her wine.

“What street?” Erik asks her, frowning.

“She means Azazel,” Charles says, yet another off-hand reminder that he’s keeping telepathic tabs on all of them at every moment. “And yes, eventually, though I’m in no rush. Perhaps when she next seeks me out—or perhaps when I get tired of waiting.”

Angel raises her eyebrows. “I know you’re pretty powerful, but the Slayer is a big deal.”

Charles smiles and gestures across the way. “Ask Erik about it. Of the two of us, he’s the only one who’s killed a Slayer.”

Angel leans back to look at Erik, seeming impressed. “I didn’t know that! Congrats.”

Erik rolls his eyes, turning to Charles as he says, “I killed her to protect you.”

“Yes, and it was very sweet,” Charles says. “Maybe I’ll get to return the favor.”

He suddenly waves a hand, which Erik realizes is a signal for Azazel, who comes over to their sitting area and gestures at the girls’ corpses. Erik has no idea where Azazel has been getting these people. These two look like they were probably eighteen—Raven’s age.

“I’ve got it, boss,” Azazel says, smiling, and then he leans over the pair and they all vanish.

“Definitely headed for the ocean,” Charles says, sounding amused. He hauls himself to his feet, swaying a little until he manages to get his balance. “I’m going to circulate. And then maybe—” He winks. “Greet another of our special guests.”

“A real sick fuck,” Angel amends as Charles walks away.

Erik watches Charles making the rounds, shaking hands and clapping people on the back like he actually is the Vampire King of Manhattan, and he can’t say that he disagrees.

It’s been a week since they saw Raven and the others—so it’s been a week since Charles first mentioned that he planned to kill her. He’s brought it up a few times since, always just as casually, like it’s an errand he needs to squeeze in when he has the time. It’s the same way he’s mentioned removing Erik’s soul: “Kill the Slayer, get rid of your soul, pick up my dry cleaning.”

Erik laughs to himself—what is he saying? Obviously Azazel picks up Charles’s dry cleaning.

The soul thing aside, Erik would be perfectly content to live out the rest of his undead years with Charles if they just left Raven and the others alone. Sure, the murdering sprees are a bit much—and the deranged little twists Charles likes to add don’t help things. But Erik figures he’s very young for a vampire, and he’s probably working this out of his system. Before long, he’ll take the average victim here and there and otherwise just go about his (un)life.

But then he remembers the telepathy part—sitting with Charles in that café all those years ago, as Charles confessed that he didn’t want to be turned, nor did he believe he should be turned. “I think I would be a terrible vampire,” he’d said. “And I mean that as in Vlad the Impaler terrible.”

Would Vlad the Impaler throw a swanky demon party in a luxury apartment with an endless supply of fresh frat boys on tap? Erik feels maybe the comparison is a bit apples and oranges.

“A vampire with a soul, huh?” Angel says, startling him out of his musings. “What’s that like?” She sighs, sounding a little wistful. “I’ve never had a soul, you know.”

“Depends on the soul,” Erik tells her. “And, I guess, on the vampire.”

As it gets closer to three, the party doesn’t show any signs of slowing down, but Erik finds himself in their bedroom, where the wall of floor-to-ceiling windows looks out over Midtown—an unreal tableau lit up at night (not that he’d know what it looks like during the day). This late, the buildings start to turn some of the lights off, but most of them are still burning away. He spends a long while staring down at the sprawl of the city, thinking too many thoughts.

“I know that you had at least four brooding spots back at the house,” Charles says suddenly. “I do wonder if this flat is lacking in that regard. It’s mind-numbingly obvious, design-wise—everything is so large and open. And no turrets.”

Erik folds his arms across his chest. “Brooding spots?”

“That’s what Raven and I called them,” Charles says as he comes up beside him. Erik glances over, and Charles laughs when he catches sight of his face. “Oh, don’t look so put out. You know you brood.”

“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” Erik says sniffily, turning back to the windows.

Charles laughs again, sliding an arm around his waist and crowding up close. He smells very strongly of fresh blood. Erik’s nostrils flare involuntarily.

“I came in here to see if you wanted to share someone with me,” Charles says. “But I wonder…”

Erik hears him shift, and then Charles is leaning even closer, his nose brushing against Erik’s neck. A tight heat pools in his groin.

“We used to do this, vampire and human,” Charles says softly. “What would it be like, vampire and vampire?”

And then Charles’s fangs are in his neck, and Erik gasps at the sensation of it—Charles is drinking delicately, suckling at him, the pressure of his lips and the slow pull of his fangs nearly driving Erik mad. His knees buckle a little, and Charles reaches out with both hands to keep him upright, his grip astoundingly strong.

Charles withdraws his fangs then, his body still pressed close to Erik’s as he murmurs into his neck, “You taste…”

And then his fangs press in again, somehow sharper than before. Erik knows he has to be fully hard now; Charles’s erection is pressing against his thigh. As Charles keeps drinking, he pushes Erik back towards the bed, lowering him down until his body’s covering Erik’s own. He’s a heavy weight on top of him, pressing him against the mattress, slowly sucking, sucking, sucking, his cock pressing insistently against Erik’s stomach. Erik’s head swims, and he imagines he’s one of Charles’s victims, trapped there, steadily losing consciousness.

Charles eventually withdraws again, pushing himself back to meet Erik’s gaze. “I don’t know how you ever did this without killing me. If you were a human, I’d have drained you by now.”

Erik gazes up at him. He feels like he’s floating. “Surely I taste different than a human.”

“Of course,” Charles says, smiling slyly. He rolls off Erik, landing flat on his back, and pulls down the already low collar of his shirt, exposing the long, pale line of his neck. “Want to see for yourself?”

Erik shifts in an instant, burying his fangs in Charles’s flesh. His blood is cold and thick—and intoxicating. He tries to drink as slowly as Charles did, but it’s hard, as Charles reaches for his fly and undoes the button and zipper, wrapping his hand around his cock. When Erik pulls off his neck, he reaches down to do the same to Charles.

There’s a strange, dreamy air to it, as they stroke each other silently, the noise of the party feeling like it’s coming from miles away. Charles finishes first, letting out a wordless gasp as he throws his head back against the mattress. Erik follows a few moments later.

They lay there for an extended moment, and then Charles says, “We should do that all the time.”

Erik laughs softly; he can’t say that he disagrees. He’s still feeling lightheaded as he props himself up and gazes down at Charles. After a beat, Charles reaches up to put a hand behind his head, pulling him in for a long, deep kiss.

When they finally break apart, Charles smiles and says, “I do still need fresh blood, though. Would you like to join me?”

Erik gazes down at him: at his too-blue eyes and the beautiful curve of his nose and the perfect bow of his red lips. He’s done so much for that face over the years; it’s no real hardship to do this. He sits up, and holds out his hand.

*

Raven has pretty strong memories the day Charles told her she was a Potential—but she has even stronger memories of the day, four years later, when he told her she had been called to be the Slayer.

It was still just the two of them then; Darwin and Sean wouldn’t show up until later that year. Early on, Raven had thought Charles sort of seemed confused about how to take care of a kid—not feeding and clothing her, obviously, but other parent stuff. He’d let her stay up really late and basically do whatever she wanted, and then he’d come in and try to put down super-strict boundaries, like he just remembered she was eleven and quickly read Parenting for Dummies or something. (Obviously those boundaries tended to last about a day, tops.)

But they’d eventually figured it all out together. Charles’s research skills were very useful when Raven got her first period and they needed to learn how tampons worked. He was such a good teacher that she actually got high scores on her tests, which was wild because when she went to normal school, they were always threatening to hold her back a grade. He’d even given her what was possibly the world’s most awkward version of The Talk: it had seemed like he was making it up on the fly, so maybe a book would have helped there, too.

Raven knew teenagers were supposed to hate their parents, and sure, sometimes Charles was incredibly annoying—but he was also her whole world. She had a fantasy that she would go off to college in a few years and learn a ton of stuff about curses (she wasn’t sure which colleges taught that, but Charles had learned it somewhere!) and then help him get free. They could keep living together, but also do things like go on vacation.

The day she learned she was the Slayer was bright and sunny, and she was out on the back lawn, doing some gymnastics moves. (She got to leave the house for that—Charles had sent her to lessons for years.) Charles came out onto the verandah and stood there for a moment with his hands in his pockets, watching her. Raven thought it was good that he was confined to the property, not just the house, so he could still get some direct sunlight, though from his complexion, you’d never know it.

She’d just finished a pretty elaborate tumbling pattern when she heard Charles clapping. She turned to find him just a few feet away, so she grinned and threw her hands up in a little pose.

“Brava,” he said. “That was quite remarkable.”

It was only then that she caught the look on his face—he wasn’t smiling at all.

“What’s wrong?” she said, frowning.

Charles opened his mouth, but after a long moment, he shut it again. He reached into a back pocket of his corduroys—and held up a very thick-looking letter. Raven’s stomach turned to ice.

“I’m sorry, Raven,” he said. “We probably ought to sit down.”

And yeah, she’d noticed some weird changes a few weeks earlier: she’d always been strong, but suddenly she was really strong, and she’d always been able to tumble, but now she was doing patterns that were twice, three times as long, stuff that had seemed at least a little complicated now laughably easy. She’d thought it was a puberty thing, maybe—like a growth spurt. She hadn’t bothered to mention it to Charles.

Apparently the previous Slayer had been Russian, and on the streets of Moscow the month before, some random vampire had snapped her neck. The Watchers Council didn’t do email, or faxes, even. Instead they wrote her a nice long letter: Dear Raven. You’re the Slayer now. Try not to die immediately.

“I’d thought…” Charles slid the letter back in the envelope, staring at it for a moment. “Well, I’d hoped…”

Raven really wasn’t into the fact that it seemed like Charles was about to cry. She punched him on the shoulder as lightly as she could. “Hey, don’t worry—it’s my birthright. I’m sure it’ll be fine.”

Charles looked up at her, and her stomach clenched further—he was crying. All of a sudden, she felt like she was going to cry, too.

“They teach us not to get too attached,” he said, his voice thick with tears. “Which I did point out was going to be a challenge if I were to become your guardian, not that they particularly cared.” He shook his head. “I’m sorry, Raven. I don’t mean to carry on. It’s just that if something were to happen to you…”

“It’ll be fine,” Raven repeated, but her voice was barely more than a whisper. It was kind of funny that she was comforting him, since he was the grown-up here, and also, she was the one who had to be the Slayer. But it was possible, she was realizing, that she hadn’t fully grasped what “being the Slayer” really meant.

Charles only nodded, and then he let out a shaky laugh, wiping his eyes with the back of his sleeve. He put a hand on her shoulder and was clearly trying to sound stern as he said, “This does mean I’m officially promoted to be your Watcher now. We should start training properly.”

“See?” Raven said, pushing past the tightness in her throat. “I’ll have the best Watcher around, so…”

Charles laughed again in a sort of sniffly way, and then he pulled her into a hug. They stayed that way for a long time: sitting on the steps of the verandah, hugging each other tightly and trying not to think about what lay ahead of them.

Today—three long years of slaying later—Raven wraps up a lengthy run around the property by staring at those same steps. If she sat there with Charles now, he’d burst into flames.

Rationally, she should be more mad at Erik. He’s supposed to have a soul! And yet he seems perfectly content to cruise around New York City with the world’s evilest vampire, apparently having public sex whenever they feel like it. (Which, soul or no soul…gross.) She likes Erik—she’s liked him since that first night he showed up on her patrol. And since Charles was taken, it really felt like she and Erik had gotten a lot closer. He wasn’t a replacement for Charles or anything, but their relationship was…important.

But the Charles stuff is so much harder, and not just because he really does seem like the world’s evilest vampire. All vampires are kind of evil, and some of them are obviously evil-evil? Charles, however… It’s been almost two weeks since they were down in the city, and Raven still hasn’t fully processed the memory of Charles walking around with his hands in his pockets, cheerfully rifling through their heads like it was the easiest thing in the world. Vampire or not, she never thought she could look at Charles and truly fear him.

A sharp, almost chilly breeze kicks up, and even though she’s still cooling off from her run, Raven zips her sweatshirt and folds her arms to keep warm. Fall is clearly coming, and she’s not even looking forward to it this year. How is she supposed to deal with the extra Sleepy Hollow nonsense when Charles is rampaging through the streets of Manhattan, terrorizing people with a smile?

They’ve set up a makeshift HQ in a sitting room a few doors down from their old HQ, Charles’s study, which no one really spent time in after Charles was taken. (Well, aside from Erik; Raven didn’t count that as a brooding spot, more of a mourning spot.) The new HQ is close enough that they can pop into the study and carry books over, and after setting up a few bookcases, it’s almost starting to look like a little library.

Moira and Sean are at the big table that they also moved into the room, 80 percent of which is currently covered with books. Hank is on one of the sofas, typing away on his laptop.

“More soul research?” Raven asks, plopping down in a chair and putting her feet up on the table.

“Telepathy, actually,” Moira says, and then she glances up and looks pointedly at Raven’s feet. It really is wild that she can make the exact same disapproving faces as Charles.

Raven swings her feet to the floor and grabs the closest book, idly flipping through it. “Charles probably has a lot of books on telepathy, right?”

“More than anyone I’ve ever encountered,” Moira says, nodding as she pulls off her reading glasses. “But again, not a terribly well-understood subject, especially when it comes to vampires with psychic powers. Charles researched it as extensively as he could. I think…”

She trails off, looking uncomfortable. Raven kind of feels like they’re past touchy subjects when it comes to Charles. She tosses the book back onto the table as she says, “What?”

“Well, he doesn’t spell anything out,” Moira says slowly. “But just going by his notes…I think Charles was genuinely worried about what might happen if he was ever turned into a vampire.”

OK, maybe there are touchy Charles subjects she still isn’t ready for. Raven leans back, looking up at the ceiling and trying to push past why she feels so terrible.

“Here, I think I found something,” Sean says, sounding excited. He drops the large book he’s holding on the table and points to the open page. “It’s an anti-telepathy…thing.”

Moira grabs her reading glasses and flips the book around. Raven comes to stand over her shoulder, peering at the illustration, and then she wrinkles her nose.

“Sean, that literally looks like a tin-foil hat.”

Sean raises his hands in surrender. “The dude designed it to block psychics!”

“And it says that he never successfully proved that it worked.” Moira pulls off her reading glasses and sits back in her chair. “So, essentially, a tin-foil hat.”

Sean looks kind of devastated. Raven can’t remember him ever trying this hard to help Charles with Watcher research.

“Thank you, though,” Moira says with a gentle smile, pushing the book back towards him. “Let’s keep looking.”

Raven rolls her eyes and heads towards the sofa, throwing herself down next to Hank. He looks momentarily petrified, but then he pushes his glasses up his nose and gives her a small smile.

“What are you working on?” she asks, peering at the screen. It is—big shocker—a spreadsheet.

“Uh…” Hank closes the spreadsheet, and then he closes the entire laptop.

“Hank…” Raven warns.

“OK, fine,” Hank says, sighing. He opens the laptop again and pulls up the spreadsheet. “Moira’s had me compile a bunch of sources to track sightings…and…disappearances.”

Raven squints at the top of the spreadsheet, which just says “CHARLES” in all-caps. There are a lot of rows of names and locations, with links to news articles and police websites. She reaches over and knocks his fingers off the trackpad, scrolling down the sheet herself. There have to be hundreds of entries.

“These aren’t all in New York, but there are a few commonalities that are making something of a pattern,” Hank explains. “They’re in the same rough age range, and they all just…vanished. We think Azazel could be picking people up—and getting rid of the victims afterwards, too, because there are many reports of missing people, but basically zero bodies.”

“Holy shit,” Raven breathes. She’s still having trouble processing what she’s seeing. “This is…”

Hank gently pushes her fingers off the track pad and shuts the computer. “Not so good, yeah.”

“Don’t worry though,” Sean calls out. “We don’t think Charles is personally killing all of them.”

Raven squints at him. “What?”

“Darwin had to go down to the magic shop in Sleepy Hollow this morning, and he talked to some of his contacts afterwards,” Hank explains. “Apparently Charles has been throwing these…parties.”

“Parties?” she repeats, baffled.

“Vampire parties, man!” Sean says, putting his hands behind his head and leaning back until the front legs of his chair tip off the ground. “I know they’re all evil murderers or whatever, but it sounds kind of sick.”

“Sick being the operative word,” Moira says dryly. “And yes, it seems the Charles problem isn’t isolated to a single pair of vampires anymore.”

Raven’s mind catches on the word “pair.” “So Erik is in on this, too?”

Moira shrugs. “You all know him much better than I do. But he’s still with Charles, so…”

Raven thinks again about how she should be more mad at Erik than Charles, but she doesn’t really know what to make of any of this. If they were two strangers, she likes to imagine they’d be dead already. But at this point, she’s not sure she’s going to be able to kill Charles at all—not for emotional reasons anymore, but physical ones. How is she supposed to stop an all-powerful telepath? Before, she might have thought Erik would at least try to protect her, but after their encounter the other week, she’s not holding her breath.

She’s suddenly full of so much energy that she just has to get up and do something. The rest of them have been researching for days on end, and they aren’t coming up with any answers.

“I’m going down to the gym,” she announces. “I’ve got to keep training for our next face-off.”

But even as she says it, she knows how futile it sounds. She can practice her punching and kicking all day and night—but that won’t mean a thing if she’s facing down someone who can control her mind.

*

Erik’s soul, Charles has decided, should be upgraded from minor annoyance to major impediment.

Another night, another party, this one even bigger than the last. Charles hasn’t seen as much of Erik as he’d like this evening, but there are many guests to attend to; he’s particularly interested to meet a senior official from the Mayor’s office who also happens to be a demon.

He said he didn’t want to get into politics—and he still doesn’t—but it never hurts to have friends in high places.

Erik is sitting among a group of vampires in a far corner of the living area, several of whom are actively feeding. Erik appears to be talking to Janos, but he’s blatantly watching a vampire with long red hair across the seating area; she looks to be nearly finished with her victim, a strapping boy who might have been a football player. Charles suspects she knows eyes are on her, because she’s really making a show of it, writhing against the boy’s neck and moaning while she sucks.

Charles isn’t opposed to anyone having sex at these parties, but he’s not throwing an orgy here. He clears his throat as he approaches, and everyone—the redhead included—falls over themselves to greet him. They know who’s keeping them in fresh blood.

Well, not Erik, of course. He gives Charles a small, tight smile—and Charles knows from his mind that while he’s happy to see him, he’d much rather they were alone. Charles slides onto the arm of Erik’s chair and drapes over him, reaching around to catch his hand and lace their fingers together.

“Charles!” a dark-haired vampire in a beautifully cut suit—Vincent, his telepathy supplies—calls out from the far side of the seating area. “I only just learned this evening that you used to be a Watcher.”

A murmur goes through the group as their minds light up in curiosity; Erik’s mind, on the other hand, seems to chill, even if he doesn’t outwardly react.

“The Watcher, in fact,” Charles says, smiling. “Of the current Slayer.” He holds up the hand that’s entwined with Erik’s, waving it a little. “And Erik was once a Watcher as well, years ago.”

The redhead—Helena—smirks. “So how do you two feel having gone over to the dark side?”

They all laugh—everyone but Erik, that is. Charles smiles even more broadly as he says, “Honestly? Absolutely magnificent.”

Charles eventually gets up to circulate again, and that’s what he does for the next few hours—punctuated, of course, by the occasional victim. All right, perhaps more than “occasional.” Around five, Erik approaches, stepping close and saying in a low voice that he’s turning in. This gives Charles a sudden and very strong urge to get everyone the hell out of their flat, so he sends the entire party a telepathic reminder of the oncoming sunrise. (That doesn’t actually mean much to the demons, so he gives them an extra mental nudge to fuck off.)

Erik is already down to his underwear by the time Charles makes his way into the bedroom. With his back to the entryway, Charles pauses to admire its exquisite lines before crossing the room and wrapping his arms around him from behind.

“You’re not actually tired,” he says, pressing his groin up against Erik’s ass as he runs his hands along the equally exquisite lines of Erik’s torso.

“I’m not,” Erik agrees. “But you’re drunk.”

Charles giggles, giving him a little thrust for good measure. “Of course I am. That’s never stopped us before.”

Erik turns around then, tugging him into a surprisingly bruising kiss, but when they pull apart, he steps backwards, efficiently stripping off his underwear and putting it in the laundry before he makes his way to the bed.

“Moody,” Charles observes.

“Maybe I am tired,” Erik says as he lays down.

Even though he’s still fully dressed, Charles jumps onto the bed beside him, propping his head up on his arm as he studies Erik’s face. “All right, so you don’t seem to enjoy the parties. We can keep things smaller-scale for a while if you’d like. Or we can change flats—change cities, even. Just say the word.”

“It’s not the parties,” Erik tells him. “Though no, I don’t enjoy them.”

Charles squints down at him. If he was still human, he’d really have to focus to push past Erik’s general malaise and figure out what’s wrong. Now, it’s barely a glancing sweep across his mind to get the entirety of it. He lets out a loud sigh as he drops back onto the bed, facing upwards.

“Your soul again,” he moans.

“Sorry if it’s such an inconvenience,” Erik says crisply, and even though Charles isn’t looking at him, he knows Erik is rolling his eyes.

“It’s just so dull,” Charles says. “I don’t even know what you see in it—”

“You know, until recently, I didn’t mind having a conscience,” Erik says.

Charles turns to him, placing a hand on his chest. “Then you do want to get rid of it?”

“No, that’s not what I meant—”

“I really think you won’t miss it,” Charles continues, talking over him. “At the very least, you’ll stop hemming and hawing every time you bite someone’s neck.”

“Why don’t we do it the other way?” Erik counters. “You get your soul restored.”

Charles stares at him. “Why would I ever do a thing like that?”

Erik is silent for a long moment, and then he says, “I did it for you.”

“I was a human!” Charles protests. “That’s completely unfair. In case you hadn’t noticed, we’re both vampires now! There should be zero souls between the two of us.”

“Look, if I agree to have sex, can we stop talking about this?”

Charles doesn’t want to stop talking about it—but he really wants to have sex. He starts to unbutton his shirt. “This conversation isn’t over, you know.”

Erik gives him a flat look, but he’s already reaching over to unbuckle Charles’s belt. “Trust me, Charles. I’m aware.”

They don’t actually discuss souls any more that night, and Charles refrains from raising the subject when they wake up the following afternoon. Knowing Erik as he does, he suspects the odds of talking him into it are quite poor; he’s just going to have to remove Erik’s soul himself.

He had Azazel pick up a computer for him shortly after he moved into this flat, which he keeps in the “study”—really more of an imitation of a room than anything. Charles suspects Shaw’s decorator chose the books purely for the aesthetic. He navigates to the Council’s databases and is amused to learn his log-in still works; he suspects if Erik were able to recall his password, his would work, too, even though he stopped being a Watcher when they all still had dial-up.

But even a cursory search reminds him of Hank’s longstanding complaint that the Council’s digital occult resources are, to put it mildly, piss-poor. (Admittedly, Hank would never say “piss-poor”—he’d probably call them “unfortunately limited” and believe he was being quite harsh with his words.) They’d actually discussed digitizing Charles’s extensive library, but there was always something else to do first—potions to brew, Slayers to train, ancient vampires to be kidnapped and subsequently murdered by.

Unfortunately, Charles can picture the exact shelf of his study—his real study up at the house, not the vulgar facsimile he’s currently sitting in—where he kept the key book he owns on soul-related spells. He studied it carefully when he wrote a paper on vampire resouling last year, but he’d never attempt the ritual without the text on hand: he couldn’t risk harming Erik, or worse, killing him.

There’s only one shop in all of New York that would be remotely likely to carry that book—and a quick phone call confirms they’ve never even heard of it. It took him months to find the copy he already owns; he doesn’t have months to search for a second one.

He glances at the time, even though he can feel it—there’s less than an hour to sunset. He finds Erik in the living area, reading a book, and bends down to give him a peck on the lips.

“Everything all right?” Erik says.

“I have an errand to run when it gets dark,” Charles tells him. “It shouldn’t take terribly long.”

“What errand?” Erik asks, his eyebrows drawing together.

Erik’s mind is already rife with suspicion, so Charles considers telling him the truth—it’s not like Erik will be able to stop him. Really, the whole thing will be quite simple: head up to the house, slip in unnoticed, and take the book. Azazel could have him in and out in a matter of minutes.

But that reminds him of Raven: dear, sweet Raven. It seems fairly likely that she’ll try to stop him from doing anything in the house. It’s not as though he wants to kill her—it’s just that his telepathy has given him incontrovertible confirmation that she’s going to try to kill him the second she has the opportunity.

Charles has been waiting for her to reappear on the streets of Manhattan, to no avail: there hasn’t even been a word of the Slayer for weeks, not since she and the others confronted him and Erik during that incident with the crossbow. He wonders if Moira and his former charges are planning something big, but he can’t imagine what; as skilled as they might be collectively, there are very few things they could attempt that his telepathy wouldn’t immediately put a stop to.

Perhaps, then, that’s the answer: a trip up to Westchester to kill two birds with one stone. Emphasis, of course, on kill.

“I’m tired of waiting for the Slayer to come to me,” Charles tells Erik, trying to keep his tone casual. “So I’m going to take care of it tonight.”

The suspicion in Erik’s mind kicks into overdrive. “Why are you calling her ‘the Slayer’?”

“Because she is. ‘Raven’ was human Charles’s charge; it’s high time we moved on from that relationship. And unfortunately for her—” He shrugs. “I’m afraid killing is the only way.”

Erik closes his book. “I’ll come with you.”

“No need,” Charles says immediately, careful not to outwardly show any concern. “Like I said, it shouldn’t take terribly long.”

Erik is silent for a moment, and then he says, “But what if you can’t get in the house?”

Charles opens his mouth to reply—but that genuinely gives him pause. “You think the wards won’t recognize me?”

“I have no idea,” Erik says. “But I know they’ll recognize me. You made sure of that.”

Charles stares at him, trying to decide what to do. He knows exactly what Erik is thinking: he is, in fact, worried that Charles is going to take away his soul any day now, and he doesn’t actually want Raven to die, either. Unfortunately for him, he’s going to be doubly disappointed tonight—though hopefully the lack of a soul will mean he’s not too bothered in the end.

“Fine,” Charles says. “But you have to promise to stay out of harm’s way.”

Erik gives him a flat look. “Which of the two of us has killed a Slayer?”

Charles lets out a surprised laugh. “Yes, darling—but I trained this one.”

He leans down to place a hand on each side of Erik’s face as he gives him a deep, lingering kiss. It almost feels like a goodbye of sorts—and in a way, he supposes it is. Years ago, he fell for Erik-without-a-soul, despite his better judgment. Now, Charles can’t wait to meet him again.

*

Erik knows Charles is lying, but he also knows Charles is reading his every thought, so there’s not really much he can do about it.

It’s mostly that the sudden desire to go up to Westchester and knock off Raven tonight screams “impulse decision.” Erik’s been a vampire long enough to know that “impulse decision” is a problem endemic to their entire population, but also he knows Charles is a better strategist than that.

Still, he’s going with it—he doesn’t feel like he has a choice. He mentally steels himself for whatever awaits them tonight, and just after sunset, he accompanies Charles downstairs for a quick bite. (A pair of teenagers making out on a bench in Central Park, and fine, he more than “accompanies” Charles—but what else is he supposed to do when an unconscious boy is shoved into his arms?)

After Azazel has whisked the teens’ corpses off to some distant body of water, he returns and says, “You wanted a ride, boss?”

“The house in North Salem,” Charles tells him. “I’m sure you know it; I’m sure Shaw knew it.”

Azazel gives him a strange look. “Yeah, of course we knew it—but all those wards meant he couldn’t get onto the property, and neither could I. Why do you think we had to wait until your house arrest was lifted to snatch you?”

Erik stares at him before he turns to Charles, who somehow seems totally unbothered by Azazel discussing the logistics of his own kidnapping and murder—which Azazel apparently helped plan well in advance. Erik feels like he’s losing his mind.

“Just outside the gates will be fine, thank you,” Charles says briskly, and then he pats Erik twice on the sleeve of his jacket. “We can walk.”

Erik doesn’t know if this whole thing is a sign of Charles’s sheer power—or his arrogance. A third option presents itself as he recalls that fateful conversation about Charles’s fear of being turned: when Charles said that “psychic powers contribute to insanity.” Has Charles been acting sane recently? Erik is hesitant to give a resounding yes on that one.

Any rational vampire would think twice before strolling up to the Slayer’s house, especially considering the Slayer’s roommates include a banshee and a demon who can shoot fire and an annoyingly attractive physician. Erik gets the kill-or-be-killed element here, but then again, he doesn’t understand why Charles didn’t just kill Raven a few weeks ago. Admittedly, it was far more dramatic to leave her hanging—and all vampires, sane or otherwise, love a bit of drama.

It’s a damp, chilly evening, and Azazel lands them on the wet leaves and gravel just outside the elaborate gate of Charles’s ancestral home, its familiar wrought-iron “X” curling at the top. Since he was turned, Erik’s had this strange affinity for metal—he can sense it, and sometimes, he can even move it around. If he focuses, he’s pretty sure he’d be able to open—

There’s a beeping sound and then a click, and the gate lurches open. He glances over at Charles, who’s standing by the keypad. He looks very amused.

“I personally would have changed it,” Charles says. “Bodes well for the wards, in my opinion.”

Erik actually thinks the real question isn’t whether Raven and the others altered the wards, but if the wards will recognize Charles now that he’s a vampire. But that question is immediately answered when Charles strides confidently through the gates like he owns the place. Which, Erik supposes…

“Are you coming?” Charles calls back to him. “Oh, and Azazel, if you wouldn’t mind waiting? This should be quite brief.”

Azazel gives him one of his salutes, and then he leans against the wall beside the gate and begins to inspect his nails.

Erik sighs and turns back towards Charles—and he also passes through the gates just fine.

It’s strange heading up the long drive towards the house, which looms ominously beneath a bright crescent moon. It’s only been a few weeks since Erik was making his way down this very path, unsure what would await him when he showed up at the address Charles had put in his head.

He glances over at Charles now, who’s walking swiftly with his hands in his pockets, the corners of his lips quirked upwards. He looks totally unbothered—like they really are just doing a quick errand.

So Erik asks him, “What’s the plan?”

“Oh, don’t worry,” Charles says immediately. “I have it under control.”

“Why am I here, then?” Erik says.

Charles actually looks annoyed at that. “Because you insisted on joining me?”

Erik opens his mouth to reply, but Charles’s expression clears, and he leans closer and links an arm through Erik’s. “Why don’t you provide me with back-up, all right? Not that I’m expecting any—”

A long arc of reddish fire shoots out across the lawn, missing them by a good three feet. They’re both initially startled, but then Charles starts to laugh.

“Looks like I spoke too soon!” he exclaims, pulling away from Erik. “You probably recall that Alex did struggle with his aim for quite some time, but we were making a great deal of—”

Another arc whizzes across the lawn—and manages to pass through the scant inches between their bodies.

“Very impressive,” Charles says, and it really sounds like he means it. “But I think that’s enough of that, don’t you?”

They’re close enough now to spot Alex standing in front of the house, wearing the chest plate Hank designed last year to help him focus his demon powers. He leans back like he’s about to shoot again—and then he drops to the gravel with a thud. Erik glances at Charles in alarm.

“Did you just kill him?”

Charles gives him a look. “He’s knocked out. I—”

Sean comes hurtling through the air, an unholy noise pouring from his mouth. Erik and Charles both crouch and cover their ears, but then Charles straightens, seemingly tracking his flight. After a moment, Erik realizes he’s directing Sean towards the grass and bringing him to a gradual landing—and the second his feet are on the ground, he slumps downward in a similar fashion.

“That’s two,” Charles says crisply, dusting his hands together. “How many more to go?”

The wards on the property were one thing, but the house itself was another. Erik didn’t expect any of their residents, even Darwin, would be able to untangle the centuries of unusual protections—he’s not sure Charles himself truly has a handle on all of them. But he certainly thinks that Darwin could manage a simple uninviting spell.

Which is why Erik isn’t too surprised when Charles opens the front door of the house and slams into an invisible barrier.

“Cute,” Charles says. “Do you think they’ve done you as well?”

Erik tentatively puts his hand through the doorway—and meets no resistance. He steps through and turns back to face Charles.

“All right.” Charles makes a little hurry-up gesture. “Invite me in.”

“You could compel one of the others to do it,” Erik points out.

“I do believe the official rule is consent has to be freely given,” Charles tells him. He raises an eyebrow. “Do you not want to invite me in, Erik?”

He doesn’t, Erik realizes now. He really doesn’t want Raven to die. He spent years actively making sure she didn’t die—sometimes he’d marvel at the strangeness of it, a vampire working so hard to keep a Slayer from getting killed. To keep Raven from getting killed.

Charles is starting to look impatient, and he says, “You know that I can’t compel them to invite me in, but I can easily compel them to come outside. So…”

“Fine,” Erik snaps. He steps back, doing a little mock-bow. “Come in, Charles.”

Charles smirks as he strides through the door—and keeps on striding, like he’s heading towards a specific destination. Erik assumes he’s sensing Raven’s mind, or one of the others…apparently in his study.

Charles slams open the study door and goes directly to the far end of the bookshelves. Erik stands in the doorway, not particularly wanting to go inside; he spent a lot of time being maudlin in this room after Charles was taken. It’s particularly unnerving to juxtapose those memories with the sight of Charles physically moving around the room again, especially because he looks increasingly agitated.

“Where are my books?” he says, pacing along the shelves. “Hundreds of them are gone—”

“Oh, we just did a little redecorating,” says a very familiar voice. “Were you looking for a particular title?”

Erik spins around to see Raven standing there with her hands on her hips. She’s wearing…a tin-foil hat? But he doesn’t even have time to process whatever the hell that means before she’s rotating a full 180 degrees and kicking him squarely in the chest. He goes flying across the hallway, landing hard on his back, and the world goes black for a second.

All right, maybe a few seconds—because when he comes to, Charles has Raven pinned against the wall of the hallway by her neck. His fangs are glinting in the low light.

“Where are my books, Raven?” he hisses, pushing his arm hard against her neck. Raven makes a choking noise, her arms and legs flailing ineffectually.

“If you want your fucking books, you shouldn’t suffocate her,” Erik calls out.

Charles glances down at him with a flat look. “I can’t read her mind.”

“Then why don’t you ask her nicely?”

Charles rolls his eyes, but he slowly lowers Raven to the floor—still keeping her pinned, but seemingly without cutting off her air supply.

“Raven,” he says slowly, like it’s physically paining him. “What did you do with my books?”

“I told you,” she spits out. “We did some redecorating.”

Charles being unable to read Raven’s mind—and, Erik suspects, Charles quickly realizing that Erik’s not about to help him kill her—apparently puts them in a bit of a standoff. A tense silence accompanies them down the hallway, though they only wind up a few doors over from the study, entering an unremarkable room Erik doesn’t remember spending much time in.

He would have remembered it looking like this, though: there’s a giant table in the center covered with books, and a few freestanding bookshelves nearby. There’s also a big whiteboard with a ton of writing on it, as well as a schematic that looks like…the tin-foil hat.

“Here are your precious books,” Raven says, gesturing to the pile on the table. Charles hurries over and starts to look through them—and then he begins to laugh.

“Focused on a few particular subjects, I see,” he says, tossing one of them aside. It lands with a thunk; Erik has never seen Charles be so rough with books before. Charles pushes through another pile as he says, “I was wondering why it seemed like specific sections of my library had gone missing.”

“Yeah, relevant subjects,” Raven shoots back. “To you.”

“Oh, gosh,” Charles says in a mocking tone, glancing up at her. “Such a shame that copy of How To Train Your Telepathic Vampire was still on back-order.”

Erik has no idea what’s going on, but he’s rapidly downgrading Charles’s sanity score by the minute.

“You know, it’s kind of funny,” Raven says, crossing around to the far end of the table and tapping her finger on the cover of a large tome. “I knew some of these dusty old books were rare, but I had no idea some of them were super rare.”

Charles pauses his search of the bookshelves and looks back at her, eyes narrowed. “Raven.”

“And that at least one of them was so rare,” Raven continues. “That it turns out you owned the only surviving copy in the world.”

Charles crosses the room with superhuman speed, on Raven in an instant and pressing her down against the table. This time, though, she gets enough purchase to push him off—and she punches him squarely in the face. Charles lets out a snarl, his features shifting again, and punches her right back.

Erik stands there, frozen to the spot, watching Raven and Charles kick the shit out of each other. She’s almost comically well-trained, but Charles is right: he’s the one that trained her. Even if Charles can’t read her mind, he seems to have an innate sense of everything she’s going to do before she does it. He eventually manages to get her down on the ground—flat on her back, his foot pressing against her ribs.

“Where. Is. The. Book,” he bites out.

Erik has always admired that even pinned to the ground and facing imminent death, Raven remains defiant. She looks up at Charles and says, “If you kill me, you’ll never find out.”

Charles laughs. “It’s my house. I’m sure I can find it eventually.”

Raven makes a fake-sad face. “Oh, I’m sorry, Charles! I totally forgot to mention—I actually loaned that one out to someone recently. Apparently it’s a great read.”

Charles blinks at her, and then he says in a terrifyingly low voice, “Who?”

Raven smiles up at him. “Darwin.”

Charles is off her in a second, rushing out into the hallway. Erik looks at the doorway, torn, and then he crosses over to Raven and extends a hand.

“Oh, hello Erik,” she says sarcastically as she grabs his hand and hauls herself to her feet. “Does this mean you’re on our side again?”

“I have no idea what’s going on,” Erik tells her. “Charles supposedly came here to kill you, but he’s losing his mind over a book—”

“I know you didn’t go the spell route,” Raven cuts in. “But there are apparently a few ways to deal with the whole vampires-and-souls situation.”

Erik frowns. He’s now reconsidering Raven’s sanity score. “This seems like a non-sequitor.”

“Over the last few weeks, we basically contacted every occult bookseller on the planet,” Raven continues. “And that’s how we learned that Charles owned the only existing copy of the book with the spells for removing a soul—” She gives him a knowing look. “And restoring one.”

Now it’s Erik’s turn to run towards the door, calling back over his shoulder, “Where’s Darwin?”

“The kitchen,” Raven says, right on his heels. “They’re doing it now—they started it the second he typed in the passcode at the gate.”

Erik glances at her as they hurry down the hall. “You left it on purpose.”

She smirks. “And Charles thinks he’s the genius.”

“But Charles can stop them,” Erik counters. “He can take control of their minds—”

“Not mine, and not theirs, either,” Raven says, gesturing to her head. “We had enough material for four tin-foil hats. Though FYI? Not really made of tin.” She makes a disbelieving face as she adds, “I still cannot believe these things worked.”

If Charles can’t track the others telepathically, Erik doesn’t know how long it’ll take him to find them: he’ll have to check each room individually, or make a very good guess. But when they turn the corner, they see Charles coming out of the room next to the kitchen—and when he catches sight of them, he immediately turns into the kitchen itself.

“Run,” Raven says, and she takes off ahead of him.

The lights are off in the kitchen, the only illumination from a circle of candles surrounding the set-up on the table: a bunch of spell ingredients, Erik assumes, with a large greenish crystal ball in the center. Darwin is at the head of the table, with Hank to his right and Moira to his left, and all three of them are holding hands as they chant.

And then Charles grabs Moira by her shoulders and yanks her out of her seat. She screams, but it’s cut off as he immediately backhands her. She drops to the floor, and Raven gasps and rushes to crouch over her.

“That’s three,” Charles says cheerfully, moving around the table. “How would you like to be number four, Hank?”

Erik steps forward to stop him, but then Raven shouts, “Erik!”

When he glances down at her, Raven’s holding up the tin-foil hat she pulled from Moira’s head. There’s no time to question things—when she tosses it to him, he catches it and immediately puts it on his head.

Suddenly, Charles turns to look at him, eyes wide. “Erik?”

Erik surges forward and grabs him, spinning him around until Charles’s back is against his front, pulling him tight against his body. Charles struggles, thrashing back against him, but Erik squeezes as hard as he can. He has the height advantage, but Charles is more broadly built. And as vampires, they were both made by Shaw—so who wound up stronger in the end?

“Finish it!” he shouts to the others, and Raven scrambles to her feet and takes Moira’s seat, holding out both hands for Hank and Darwin to take. Darwin immediately resumes reading the incantation. It’s only then that Erik notices the book in question sitting open on the table. It’s very small.

“Don’t do this, Erik,” Charles warns, a tempest in his arms as he tries to get free. Erik pulls even tighter across his chest, pressing his face into his neck.

“I want to keep my soul,” Erik says in his ear. “And you’ll want to keep yours, too.”

“I don’t want it,” Charles insists, punctuating the word by pulling forward so hard that he nearly breaks free. “You don’t get to decide for me.” He turns his head, pressing his cheek back against Erik’s, sounding frantic. “All those years you secretly dreamed of turning me, but you would never do it. You knew Shaw would come back for me eventually, he told us both that he would—”

“No,” Erik says firmly, shaking his head as he squeezes Charles tighter.

“He got tired of waiting for you,” Charles says. “You left me for Shaw to turn.”

“No,” Erik repeats. “You’re wrong.”

Charles suddenly stills in his arms. “You can’t lie to a telepath, Erik. This is what you wanted all along.”

His voice sounds broken. Erik just keeps on holding tight; he has no idea what to say.

“You killed me once,” Charles continues. “And you’re killing me again.”

The words pierce Erik’s heart, but before he can reply, Darwin’s head snaps back, and he starts shouting towards the ceiling in a language Erik can’t recognize. He looks possessed—and when Raven glances back at Erik, she makes an is-this-supposed-to-happen kind of gesture. Erik isn’t sure that it is.

But a few moments later, Darwin takes a deep, gasping breath and his head drops downwards just as violently as it had gone back. The crystal ball flares a bright, lurid green, bathing the entire room in a kind of sickly light, before it turns dark again—and Charles goes utterly limp in Erik’s arms.

*

Raven liked basic fall stuff long before she became the Slayer, but she likes it even more these days because she loves Halloween: her one night off per year. Apparently vampires and demons tend to think of Halloween as amateur hour, and they usually stay home. So tonight, Raven gets to stay home, too.

It really is too bad they always have zero trick-or-treaters. She gets it: this area is all giant mansions, and even if kids rang the bell down at the gate, it’s still a very long walk up the driveway. But Raven thinks they’d appreciate the house’s eerie vibes; she certainly found them scary when she was eleven.

Still, more candy for her. She dumps the entire bag of peanut butter cups into her big orange jack-o’-lantern bucket, joining layers of Twix, Butterfingers, and tiny bags of Skittles. She shakes the whole thing to mix it all up, and then she hauls it out of her bedroom.

Sean is her first stop—she can hear strains of “Thriller” coming from his room, and it actually sounds like he’s singing along. But when he opens the door, his face falls.

“Shit,” he says. “Are we doing costumes?”

Raven glances down at her outfit—it’s sort of a half-costume, a black crop top and black cat ears. She’s still wearing sweatpants; it’s her night off!

“Trick-or-treat,” she says, holding up the bucket. Sean’s eyes grow wide.

“Sweet!” He digs in and takes a giant handful of candy. “Can I roll you a joint in exchange?”

Raven laughs. “Maybe later.” She glances down at all the candy. “Actually, definitely later.”

Hank is next, way down in his lab. You need to give him a little warning if you want him to show his face within a couple of hours, and her trick-or-treat rounds are also a reminder that they’re all meeting in the TV room shortly.

Unfortunately, her casual cat costume seems to be a little too much for Hank: when he catches sight of her, he drops the container he was holding, and a steaming white liquid spills across the entire surface of the table.

“I’m sorry,” she says as she helps him mop it up. “Wait—are we going to turn into frogs for breathing this in?”

“No,” Hank says quickly—a little too quickly. Raven gives him a suspicious look.

The kitchen is next, where she conveniently hits Alex and Darwin at the same time. They’re supposed to be preparing the snacks, but they’re currently leaning against the counter, making out.

“Sorry about that,” Darwin says when they pull apart, though he doesn’t sound sorry—he’s kind of laughing. He catches sight of her bucket and lights up further. “Ooh, you got the good stuff!”

Alex glares at him, then at Raven. “We already have cookies and popcorn—”

“Oh my God, Alex, it’s Halloween,” Darwin protests, and before Alex can reply, Darwin shoves an entire peanut butter cup in his mouth. Raven nearly doubles over laughing.

She heads for Moira’s office next. They recently turned the room they used for the temporary HQ into a permanent space for her to do Watcher things; Moira moved a lot of the books back, but she kept the whiteboard. Raven finds her sitting at her desk, rubbing her temples with her index fingers.

“Are you all right?” she asks, hauling up the candy bucket and plunking it onto the desk.

“Just trying to figure out how to ‘politely word’ the letter where I tell the Council—oh thank God, please give me some chocolate right now.”

Raven laughs as Moira grabs a Twix and immediately rips the packaging open.

“I don’t know why you bother writing to the Council at all anymore,” Raven says as she tears the corner of a Skittles bag and taps a few into her palm. “Especially about this—what if they send another Cecil?”

Moira blinks at her. “Cecil?”

“Never mind. I’m just saying, you’re opening the door for them…”

“I’ll still be your official Watcher,” Moira says, reaching for another Twix—slower this time. “And it’s unlikely I’ll be practicing full-time.” She waves the Twix in the air. “Honestly, the Council should be thrilled to have someone who wants to do this kind of thing around here…”

A few weeks back, Moira told them she missed being a doctor, and that she felt like she could do the same sort of supernatural monitoring in Westchester that she’d been doing back in England. The hospital in Sleepy Hollow isn’t all that big, but unsurprisingly, it does have a lot of very weird cases. (OK, so no one there has ever said that outright, but Moira did some research and read between the lines.) She’s super qualified, so they obviously want to hire her, but there’s still stuff about medical licenses from different countries to sort out—and, of course, Moira has to break the news to the Council.

“I’m going to keep it short and sweet,” Moira says, looking determined. “OK, maybe not sweet, but—”

“I’d tell them to fuck off and leave us alone forever, but what do I know?” Raven shrugs. “I’m just the Slayer.”

Moira laughs. “You know who you sound like?”

“He’s next in my rounds,” Raven says. She pulls a half a dozen more Twix from the bucket and lines them up on Moira’s desk. “Good luck—and if you don’t know what to say, just tell them there are only so many Watchers a girl can handle at once.”

She carries the bucket a few doors down, but she leaves it in the hallway; she won’t need it in here. When she knocks, there’s a loud thump. After a long pause, Erik calls out, “Come in.”

He’s sitting at the desk, and he glances up from his book and smirks. “Nice cat costume.”

“Half-costume,” Raven corrects. “What are you going as?”

“A vampire,” he deadpans.

Raven rolls her eyes, crossing into the study and perching on the edge of the desk. She cranes her neck to see what he’s reading—and it’s only then that she realizes he’s holding the book upside-down.

“Charles?” she says sharply.

“Found it!” a muffled voice calls out, and Charles pops out from under the desk, waving a pen in the air.

Raven looks at Charles on his knees, then at Erik in the chair, then at Charles again. They may as well be holding up a big neon sign. She lets out a loud groan, covering her eyes with her hands as she says, “Do you guys do anything except have sex in here?”

“We do research,” Charles says—at the same moment that Erik says, “Not really.”

She makes an even louder noise of disgust. “Why do I ever set foot in this room?”

When she removes her hands from her eyes, Charles is standing with his hand on Erik’s shoulder. He looks a little embarrassed, but Erik looks way too pleased with himself.

“Did you need something, Raven?” Erik says mildly.

“She’s here to remind us about Halloween movie night,” Charles says, but after a beat, he winces. “So sorry, Raven.”

Charles has been working on the “reading everyone’s mind at all times” thing. Some days are better than others.

“It’s fine,” Raven tells him. “I am here to remind you about Halloween movie night.”

Erik rolls his eyes as he sits back in his chair. “Remind me again why we have to be subjected to some mangled, offensive Hollywood version of vampires—”

“Come on, it’s Halloween,” Raven protests. “My one night off!”

“Don’t worry,” Charles says, his hand still firmly on Erik’s shoulder. “We’ll be there.”

Raven high-tails it out of there after that. She just knows they’re trying to figure out how much sex they have time for before movie night starts.

Things have been…mixed with Charles and Erik over the past month. Probably about as good as they could be, Raven concedes, since the month before that, one of them was running around New York City tormenting people and throwing literal murder parties, and the other one (despite having a soul the whole time!) was basically going along with it.

Well, now Charles has a soul, too. They really had no idea if the spell was going to work—that night, Raven was more focused on making sure Charles didn’t kill her or anyone else before they could get through it. Charles had been distracted looking for that book, but Raven got the sense that if he’d managed to find it, he’d have snapped her neck moments later.

Sometimes she can’t shake the vision of Charles standing over her, his fangs out and his foot pressing hard on her ribs. But then, sometimes she remembers when Darwin completed the spell, and Charles collapsed in Erik’s arms, looking…dead for real. She’s pretty sure her heart stopped beating for a few seconds.

Charles didn’t wake up until the following sunset. He was pretty upset, to put it mildly. He’d said some kind of devastating things to Erik right before his soul came back, but now that it was back, Erik seemed to be the only one that Charles wanted to be around for a while. Raven doesn’t know what they were talking about while they were holed up in Charles’s bedroom for days—vampire-with-soul stuff, she supposes. It’s not like there were support groups or anything.

It would be easy to fall back on the old “it was just some random demon taking up residence in your body,” but yes, Raven has actually been listening to everyone telling her that it’s more complicated than that. Look at Erik! Sure, he sort of redeemed himself in the end, but he made a lot of questionable decisions with a soul.

It wasn’t until about a week after Charles got his soul back that the two of them finally talked. He knocked on her bedroom door one night while she was…reviewing the course offerings for online college. (OK, she was reading a Reddit thread on supposed cryptid sightings. It’s her job!)

Charles was back to wearing his old clothes, which Raven suspected wasn’t as much about the soul as the fact that he had yet to go back down to the city, where all his fancy vampire clothes were. She kind of hoped he stuck with this look, because it was very reassuring to see him in a cardigan and corduroys again, even if, up close, she could still obviously tell he was a vampire.

“Raven…” he’d said slowly, perched on the edge of her bed. “I don’t know if there are enough apologies in the world…”

“Hey.” She punched him on the shoulder—and didn’t bother to make it light. “I tried to kill you, too, remember?”

Charles gave her half a smile. “You were just doing what I trained you to do—and you did it beautifully.”

Even after everything that had gone down, hearing that still gave her the same feeling that praise from Charles her Watcher always did. When she leaned in to wrap her arms around him, he froze for a moment, but then he seemed to relax, reaching up to rub a hand across her back. She tried not to think about how weird it was, but he was so cold. Not breathing, no heartbeat…

“Yes,” Charles said as they pulled apart. “It’s taken some getting used to.” He paused and made a face. “That and my overactive psychic abilities. I need to learn how to block you all out.”

“Come on, this is a golden opportunity for you,” Raven teased. “Use your mind-powers to force me to train! Or worse—” She paused for effect. “Do my homework.”

She immediately realized that Charles wasn’t up to the “joking about having been an evil vampire” stage yet. He looked pretty uncomfortable as he said, “I think I’ve used quite enough of my mind-powers for the time being, thank you.”

“OK,” she said, trying to backtrack. “There are other vampire powers you can still use even with a soul. Like super-strength—for opening jars?”

Charles let out a laugh. “Yes, and no need to bathe. Saves me minutes every day.”

Raven wrinkled her nose, but then she remembered the big one. “And you get to live forever!” She paused, reconsidering. “…with Erik.”

But Charles smiled softly at that, sounding totally sincere as he said, “Yes. I do.”

Raven thinks that everything turned out pretty OK in the end, all things considered. She drops the candy bucket on the table in the TV room, which she already decorated earlier this afternoon: little ghost-shaped candles and lots of fake cobwebs with plastic spiders, plus orange and black streamers everywhere. Erik can roll his eyes all he wants, but Raven lives with a werewolf, a warlock, a banshee, a half-demon, two vampires, and three Watchers. They’re celebrating Halloween whether he likes it or not.

“Wow, it looks awesome in here,” Darwin says as he walks in balancing a large plate of cookies in each hand, Alex trailing behind him with the popcorn. “Raven, I think you missed your calling as a decorator.”

Raven laughs. “You can tell the Watchers Council they read the ‘calling’ part wrong.”

“Let me hook up my Halloween playlist,” Sean announces when he strolls in next, holding up his phone as he crosses to the TV area. “It’s got all the classics! ‘Monster Mash,’ the Ghostbusters theme—”

“We’re here to watch a movie,” Alex protests.

Sean glares at him. “It sets a mood.”

Hank appears about halfway through “Monster Mash,” holding up two six-packs of Coke. “I grabbed some beverages.”

“And I grabbed some adult beverages,” Moira says as she walks in right behind him, waving a bottle of wine.

“Not all adults,” Erik mutters.

He and Charles are bringing up the rear, and he’s got his arm around Charles’s shoulders. They’ve both been a lot more touchy-feely in front of the rest of them since they came back to live in the house. Raven has wondered if it’s a vampire thing—they never used to do that when Charles was a human. She supposes it’s better than literally walking in on them having sex, but still…

“Oh Raven, you did a lovely job,” Charles says, glancing around. “Very festive.”

Erik only makes a face and steers him towards one of the sofas.

“OK,” Raven announces once they’ve all taken a seat. “This is a democracy—up to a point. As Slayer, I retain the right to overrule your votes.”

They all immediately begin arguing with her, but she only grins as she turns on the TV. “So there’s Dracula, of course—”

“Which one?” Alex calls out.

“—Blade, What We Do In the Shadows, Interview with the Vampire—”

“No,” Moira interrupts firmly. When they all turn to look at her, she clarifies, “Brad Pitt has the charisma of a wooden plank.”

“Kirsten Dunst is quite good, though,” Charles counters.

“Why does it have to be vampires?” Erik complains, gesturing to the others. “What about Practical Magic? Or An American Werewolf in London?”

“Most werewolf movies are quite inaccurate,” Hank points out.

“Yeah, because the vampire ones are like documentaries,” Darwin says, laughing.

Raven turns back to the TV. “Ooh—what about the original Nosferatu?”

“Literally the most offensive out of all of them!” Erik shouts. “On multiple fronts!”

“Darling, I think this is a losing battle,” Charles tells him.

They all start squabbling again, so Raven keeps clicking through movies. Yeah, so maybe she’s bound by prophecy, one girl in all the world chosen to slay vampires and probably be brutally murdered before she can legally order booze. But in other ways, she kind of has the best life. She gets to live with all these weirdos in a giant haunted mansion, and now she has not just one, but two sort-of-father-figures who also happen to be vampires with souls.

Suddenly, she sees exactly what they should watch. Since they’re all distracted, she pulls up the movie and hits pause while the screen is still dark. She grins and marches back to the sofa, wedging herself in between Charles and Hank.

“Oh!” Hank says. “I, uh…”

Raven laughs, nudging his shoulder, before she snuggles up against Charles, who gives her a soft smile and pats her knee. He’s still extremely cold—but she’s getting used to it.

“All right,” she announces. “Without further ado…”

And then a lush green forest appears on the screen, and as Kristin Stewart’s voiceover begins, they all start shouting at once.

Raven just grins and snuggles even closer to Charles. They can fight her if they want—but they don't stand a chance against the Slayer.