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The thing about being a vampire was that Ilya wasn’t supposed to be one at all.
And yes, technically, he also wasn’t supposed to go on an alcohol and cocaine-fueled bender after punching his dickhead brother in the face at their father’s funeral or wander shamelessly into Moscow’s ritzy вампир District and schmooze his way into an exclusive vamps-only club or let some sleazy rich boy in an ugly silk shirt bite him in a frenzy as they fucked in a back room, sealing the wound so sloppily that Ilya woke up without a heartbeat and the knowledge that he was now frozen in time as a depressed, broke, mediocre PhD student for the next few hundred years of his twenty-six year old life.
But he had done all that. So.
Fangs it was.
Svetlana had been thrilled, at first, when Ilya had texted her to confess he’d been Turned the night before, hungover and sprawled out on the floor of his childhood bedroom in the now-empty historic Rozanov Manor — his father and his father’s father and all their fathers before them rewarded handsomely for services rendered as glorified human shields for Russia’s notoriously corrupt Vampyric High Council. Her excitement had rapidly morphed into horror when Ilya had explained the dubious circumstances of his vamping. In theory, it was illegal to be Turned without informed consent, but Ilya, prone to attracting trouble wherever he went, had predictably found himself embroiled in the perfect storm of criminal controversy:
1) He was under the influence when the bite occurred, which cast significant doubt upon his ‘recollection’ of the event,
2) the accused vampire in question was the first born child of a notoriously lawless oligarch currently dodging human trafficking charges, and worst of all,
3) they were both men, making the act essentially un-reportable.
Ilya wasn’t a lawyer or a judge by any means, but he’d grown up with a Vamp Policeman for a father and had heard enough about Russian activist organizations’ feeble attempts to prosecute hate crimes, both vampire and human, to know that the Big Queer Elephant in the room would override any other offenses that had occurred. Naturally, he had spent many days after feeling sick and confused, violated almost, by the hazy line of consent from that night, remembering begging for the Bite, begging to feel something, anything, and trusting that the vamp in question — his Sire, ugh — would be wise enough to ‘Seal, Heal, and End the Deal’ as the old adage went, before the Bite could trigger the change.
That bag of mixed emotions had morphed into pure frustration after his long chat with Svetlana (a Natural Borne Vampire or, as was the modern fashion, ‘NBV’) who’d explained that while Russian law might not be on his side, the act of Turning someone not completely sound of mind and with whom you did not intend to properly mate was a grievous ethical offense among their kind.
‘Cool, so I have another neglectful father to pin my daddy issues on,’ he’d joked, making Svetlana snort her drink out of her nose on their FaceTime call and yell at him for being so terribly glib about the whole ordeal.
In the end, he’d thanked her for being a comfort in those early days anyway — already owing the world to his dearest childhood best friend and responsibly bitey part-time lover for putting up with his constant bullshit — though she’d continued to be apologetic about the fact that she couldn’t better advise him through the fledgling phase. It wasn’t her fault, he’d assured her, knowing that in her purebred (ick) aristocratic circles, they were rarely taught about the effects that their bites could have on humans, who were regarded in the most bigoted of vamp spaces as nothing more than a blood bag with a pulse. NBVs, upper crust and otherwise, didn’t get puncture flu or suffer through months of indescribable Thirst or spend all their time navigating their super-powered body’s discombobulating new relationship to gravity; they just were.
It was easy to be a vampire if that was all you’d ever known. Ilya missed McDonald’s cheeseburgers like a motherfucker.
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Arriving back on McGill’s campus, two weeks post-Bite and into the fall term of the alleged final year of his doctorate in Cryptid Sciences (specializing in the theoretical physics of the Mothman’s multi-dimensional time warp capabilities), Ilya was attempting to take the whole undead creature of the night thing in stride. Easier said than done, maybe, given that there was unfortunately a teensy bit of social stigma associated with being a Turned ex-human without at least a visible token of his vampire sire’s affections to denote him as Claimed, much less a permanent Mated neck mark. Cliff, an NBV who shared a lab with him, had sweetly offered his ‘bearding’ services to quiet the rumor mill, but Ilya had shrugged him off, joking that maybe he’d find a partner for real now that he had legal, above-board access to the buffet of hotties that made up Montreal’s supernatural nightlife.
And while it was true that Ilya’s history of sexual partners was broad and exploratory — all genders, all creatures always on the table — he did harbor a slight preference for vamps. Not the waif-like ones that had the complexion of a consumption-stricken Victorian ghost (no slight meant toward ghosts, who were also a good fuck, to be fair), but the golden, broad-shouldered immortals who looked like they could wield a spear, and maybe had, depending on how close to the Original Few they were. Sneaking around the vampiric haunts of Moscow and Montreal had been a thrill — until that had literally come back to bite him, of course — but now, fanged and ready, Ilya could snack freely.
And boy, did he.
Still lacking in the control needed to responsibly live feed, he would slurp down a blood bag and then hit the town, channeling his newfound endurance into fucking his way through the city’s willing creatures — mainly open-minded vamps (who didn’t mind his unmated Turned status), gumihos, sirens, and one very harrowing night with a centaur/harpy couple that had left him both confused and horny for days after.
‘You’re taking to this life surprisingly well,’ Svetlana had remarked on one of their weekly bestie calls, back in Boston where she was doing another MBA at Harvard for the hell of it, ‘I always thought you had a… distaste for our culture.’
Ilya had rolled his eyes. ‘Staying hot basically forever is not the worst thing. What I hate is Russian politicking and the vamps just happen to run the country. The diplomatic bullshit my father would drag me around to, hoping I would follow in his footsteps and become a protective agent for the Council… Yeah, no thank you.’
‘Well, you’re free from that obligation now, at least,’ she’d agreed, ‘The Council will be intrigued that you were Turned, but I’m certain they’ll politely look away when they find out whose son is behind it.’ Her voice had softened after, as she’d quietly pried at his actual emotional state, rightly sensing that Ilya was being more flippant about his transformation than expected. ‘Ilya, if you need me there… to feed—’
‘I’m okay, Sveta, really,’ he’d assured her, annoyed at the way his fangs had slid into his bottom lip at the temptation of fresh blood, fellow vamps allegedly the sweetest of the bunch. ‘There’s lots of support for fledglings in Canada. And Cliff, my NBV friend, is keeping me safe out there. I’m just having a little fun in this new body, but I’ll chill out soon. Don’t worry.’
And speaking of fun, it was after one of these wild nights out, a few weeks now into the fall term, that he returned to a strange pink paper taped to his front door, the logo of the apartment complex’s property management group stamped in the top corner. ‘Notice of Eviction’ the paper read from afar and Ilya felt his nonexistent heart beat thunk in his chest. He’d been found out. And the blessing of dirt cheap, stabilized rent he’d been paying for several years in his Humans Only building was evaporating before his eyes.
He poked through his memories, trying to figure out who or what might’ve tipped them off, before realizing with a sinking feeling that the forms he’d filled out with Fledgling Student Support Services at the campus clinic had mentioned using his ID to verify both academic status and proof of residency. Starving beyond belief, he’d simply scribbled down his real address, eager for the small allotment of synth-blood bags that the university provided as part of his transition meal plan. Three bags a week for three months, and then he’d be expected to either register with a local coven’s bank or submit signed donor paperwork from a willing vampire or human partner. McGill FSSS had probably contacted his landlord to confirm he was on the lease, leaving him pretty much zero room for plausible deniability. Fuck.
Snatching the paper off his door, Ilya stalked into his admittedly terrible studio apartment, grateful that his frozen body no longer sought homeostasis and was therefore numb to the pitiful HVAC’s commitment to an always too hot or too cold interior, no matter the alleged temperature setting on screen. He read through the rest of the letter at his kitchen counter, dismay growing at the terms of the eviction: the upcoming standard rent, plus eviction fees, and the three-month’s rent penalty for breaking his lease early? His head started to spin, and not just from the plasma shots with Cliff at the club earlier, estimating that he was looking at a conservative five thousand dollars in charges that he was meant to somehow produce in… he squinted… two. fucking. weeks. Never mind the cost of moving to a new place after forfeiting his security deposit. It was an impossible ask for an international grad student who had already spent most of his PhD subsisting on ramen and McDonald’s hash browns, with only his scholarship and a tiny stipend from teaching an undergraduate seminar on the Quantum Mechanics of Loch Ness each fall term keeping him afloat.
Most of this document probably wasn’t even enforceable, couched in endless legalese meant to confuse or scare him, though he’d have to spend even more on an attorney to find out. And honestly, even if he had ‘sue people’ money and time to spare (he did not), what respectable lawyer would take the case? He was a vampire in a Humans Only building. Terms of payment notwithstanding, the eviction rationale itself seemed pretty cut and dry.
Sinking onto his creaky bed with a groan, Ilya scrubbed a hand over his face and then immediately pulled out his phone to google ‘easy ways to earn money fast’ as if he hadn’t searched the same thing last term when his online tutoring job had started offering him fewer hours for no discernible reason. Just as he'd found before, there were endless listicles about taking surveys and selling your plasma (ha) and forums on the pros and cons of various gig economy jobs, and then a whole dark spiral into personal loan debt, but nothing screamed $5k in 14 days. Frustrated, he typed in increasingly specific and varied search terms, synapses finally firing on all cylinders when he stumbled upon a Tumblr post that, if true, could be exactly what he was looking for.
Well, it was worth a fucking try, eh? Not bothering to read the rest of the post yet, Ilya opened the App Store and quickly located the Bloodbanker$ app, its icon a stylized purple ‘B’ with two fangs coming out of the bottom. At first glance, it seemed to work like any other dating or hookup platform, prompting him to create a profile before he could begin swiping and messaging. Copying most of his photos and prompt responses over from his other apps took a little time, but within twenty minutes, Ilya Rozanov had a fully functional ‘blood baby’ profile, with his settings adjusted to male Donors within a few hundred kilometers (another scan of the Tumblr advice post had revealed that while there were some high net worth women and genderless beings on these sort of sugaring platforms, you would have much better luck bagging male-identifying users, if you were into them). With one final scan of all the details, he saved his profile preferences and published his desperate ask for the world to see. There, done. Donor daddies, come forth!
One abs shot added to his profile and what must have been several hundred tipsy swipes later, Ilya awoke mid-day to 53 new messages, his entire phone screen covered with purple Bloodbanker$ notifications. Mouth cottony from the bender the night before, he tongued at each sore fang and winced, padding over to the fridge to suck down the last quarter of a synth-blood bag. Settling on a bar stool at his tiny kitchen counter, he bent over his phone and got to work in the app, filtering out a number of candidates right away — half of the profiles clearly fake or featuring misleading information at best.
Pickier now after the initial purge, Ilya used some of the Tumblr post tips from vampqueen to sort for those most likely to actually pay a premium price for, er, companionship. Age wasn’t a deal-breaker at all for him — obviously, given the search for a vampire daddy old enough to have very liquid assets — but some of these guys… yikes, it was as if they hadn’t dated since the 1800s. Aging at like 1/1000th of the human rate, basically frozen in time once you neared your thirties (for NBVs at least), but stuck with mid looks and a bland personality? No wonder some people still considered natural vampirism a curse.
Feeling decidedly less optimistic about his get rich quick scheme in the sober light of day, Ilya swiped out of the app with a yawn and glanced at the microwave clock, noting he had about forty-five minutes before his weekly doctoral research seminar. It was a grueling three hours of rigorous textual analysis and group discussion, distinctly un-fun in comparison to his experiments in the lab, but at least Cliff would be there too. And they always got dinner afterward, which was a simpler affair now that they didn’t have to look for restaurants that accommodated both vamp and human diets. He silenced his phone and performed the five short steps that it took to cross from kitchen to bathroom in his minuscule space, flicking on the shower to let the water begin to warm (out of habit, obviously, since he barely felt the cold anymore).
Ducking under the spray, Ilya considered the situation once more. Maybe the eviction was a good thing anyway? Getting out of the accommodation he’d merely tolerated and into something a bit more comfortable for the remainder of his studies ought to do wonders for his stress-addled dissertation brain, right? And it wasn’t like he was in completely dire straits right away if the funds weren’t all sorted by Day 14; it would takes months of missing payments for his shitty building management to send him to collections, and Cliff had a legit room in his vamp student group house opening up in the spring that Ilya could occupy now that he wasn’t just the cutesy human sidekick. He could, ugh, beg his brother for mercy even, if he really had to, and ask for a tiny drop of whatever was left of the fortune their father had willed to Andrei alone.
Just as Ilya was finishing packing for class and weighing whether a pleading call to his brother was worth the devastating blow to his pride, his phone screen silently lit up again with another three Bloodbanker$ notifications. He sighed. Surely one desperate sap on this silly app would be willing to pay just enough for Ilya’s time? Or several smaller bidders in conjunction even, as long as they were all free for a meetup in the next two weeks with their wallets open.
Ilya was passably attractive (okay, fine, he was hot and he knew it) and charismatic and willing to suck at least one dick for money in a safe, neutral location in order to keep his academic dreams alive. What [actually rich, non serial-killing] Donor could resist?
He just needed to keep swiping.
“What about this one?” Cliff proposed around a mouthful of pizza, or what the vamp Italian joint called ‘pizza’ anyway, which was more like a smear of synth-blood across some bio-engineered crust substitute that was digestible for them. Allergen-free too sans garlic, obviously, a fact which had made Ilya nearly shed a tear, claiming he’d rather die than live without spices. Calling him a drama queen, Cliff had unhelpfully reminded Ilya that he couldn’t die again (or well, he could, but only in extremely specific, torturous ways) and also that science had progressed to the point of generating flavor-infused blood options for the Turned anyway.
Sliding Ilya’s phone back across the table, Cliff gestured at the screen, saying, “He looks hot. And normal-ish? If that’s really him.”
Wary, Ilya glanced down, mistrusting (and a little judgmental) of Cliff’s taste in men so far, and then promptly ate his own words, mumbling a quiet ‘holy shit’ around his pizza bite. He definitely did not remember swiping on this very expensive-looking hottie last night. Shoutout drunk me, always looking out, he thought, and pinched his fingers to zoom in closer, before swiping through the other photos (also hot) and prompts (standard fare, if a little bland).
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“And it looks like he already messaged you first,” Cliff added with a shrug, “A man with initiative. Sounds promising.”
Crossing his fingers for something even remotely approaching the realm of normal human, er, person to person interaction, Ilya tapped into the chat.
Okay, well, that was… boring, he thought, swallowing another bite. And like, oddly formal? But not the worst opener he’d received on the app by far, especially given that Bloodbanker$ allowed you to send photos. He shuddered, not sure he could stomach many more unsolicited, poorly framed dicks with bad lighting for one evening. He typed out an honest reply anyhow, seeing that this supposed Shane was currently active, and thinking they might as well get the creepy bits over with.
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Ilya cringed a little as he typed out his reply about the whole blowjobs thing, still genuinely not opposed to the idea of hooking up for money (although vampqueen said that it was giving up too much too soon to have sex with your Donor on the first date, arguing it was more lucrative to make them wait for it). But it didn’t sound like this Shane wanted a real blood baby at all, just a temporary fake dating situation that would actually suit Ilya’s financial needs perfectly, if Shane was real and being honest about the whole thing.
To be determined.
In the time he’d considered asking for more detail, Shane had been very busy it seemed, a whole business plan paragraph of text appearing onscreen.
Ilya’s phone slipped from his hands completely as he read the offer, the device clattering onto the table and making Cliff jump in surprise.
“Jesus Christ!” he yelped, asking “Another dick pic?” when he took in the shell-shocked, slightly nauseous look on Ilya’s face.
“No, uh…” Ilya recovered his phone and spun it around to display the most recent message.
Cliff’s eyebrows slowly approached his hairline as he read. “God damn, that’s thirty thousand dollars, bro.”
Ilya swallowed. “I have to do it, right? Like… if real, that is life changing stuff. New apartment, for sure, and no worries for the rest of my degree program.”
Cliff nodded aggressively. “Couldn’t fucking hurt to try. Just be safe though, if you do meet him. Like tell me where it’s happening and I’ll track you the whole time. Get a table next to you at the restaurant and wear sunglasses if I have to.” He snapped his fingers, eyes lighting up with another idea. “Oh, and ask for some cash up front! That way you’ve basically solved your rent fuckery no matter what.”
“You really think he will go for this?”
“If he’s a rich dude with some real money to throw around? Yeah, why not?” Cliff shrugged again, shockingly casual about the whole endeavor. “And if he refuses to negotiate or ghosts you in the chat, you’ve already got like a hundred other matches in less than a day, even after eliminating the duds. The vamp daddies seem thirsty as hell.” He cracked a smile. “Heck, I’m tempted to make an account now too. If you don’t get kidnapped or eaten on this first date. You’re my null hypothesis.”
“Oh sure, anything for the spirit of scientific inquiry, bro,” Ilya deadpanned, typing out another reply.
Okay, fine, so maybe Ilya had deviated a little bit from the plan at the end there but the casual shirtless pic in return was completely unfair. Like hell this guy was really about to send him $5,000 just to like… plan to hang out? And looking like that under his suit (allegedly)? Ilya copied over his account details for an Interac e-transfer anyway — expecting absolutely nothing, maybe an excuse from Shane later about a blocked transaction at best — and nearly fainted when, not a moment later, his email and banking apps were chiming with simultaneous notifications. Hands shaking, he clicked to expand the email notification first and wanted to cry.
“Hey, Marly,” he said, mouth gone so dry that his voice cracked pathetically on the words.
Cliff glanced up at the use of the nickname, carried over from the beer league hockey they played together each spring. “Yeah, Roz?”
“We are ordering another pizza.”
There was the whoosh and chime of the feed connecting and then Shane appeared on his phone screen, smiling sweetly, with a gentle ‘hello’ that made Ilya’s toes curl into his shitty carpet. Soon to be ex-carpet, though, thank god, or well… thanks to his new vamp daddy Donor actually.
The same one who was looking back at him on their video call, face as youthful and as handsome as in his apparently all too real profile pictures. Do not immediately offer to suck his dick again, Ilya repeated to himself on a frantic loop, before opening his mouth and offering a ‘hi’ of his own.
“It was a good idea to chat in advance,” Shane said, his voice accented in a pleasant Canadian way, though tinged with something almost… antiquated in its rhythm, “Thank you for suggesting it.”
“It was my friend’s idea actually,” Ilya explained, “Svetlana. She is NBV too. We grew up in Moscow together since we were kids, so she can be, ah, a little protective. She did not want me to meet you without confirming identity first.”
“Svetlana,” Shane murmured, looking thoughtful. Ilya, experiencing a brief moment of insanity, felt the urge to lick at those furrowed eyebrows. “What’s her last name? Maybe I know her.”
“Vetrova,” Ilya answered immediately, and then realized that giving away his friend’s full government name to a total stranger probably wasn’t his best move.
Fuck, okay, Svetlana might have a point about his pathetic degree of self preservation and general street smarts. Though, in truth, it was kind of a miracle he'd still been alive at twenty-six for a lot of reasons, and now he couldn’t die (at least not easily), so in a way Ilya hadn’t faced any consequences from his long history of reckless human behavior at all.
Something darker passed over Shane’s features at the reply, though he carefully rearranged his face to reflect an easy pleasantry again, as he said, “Ah, that’s a very old family.”
“Three degrees from the Original Few,” Ilya parroted on instinct, the history of all of Russia’s elite vampire lineages burned into his memory by his father long ago.
“Four,” Shane corrected, off-handed like he was remarking on the weather.
Ilya blinked. It was a strange thing to know off the top of your head like that, but maybe Shane was just really into vampire history or something. Ilya did love a nerd.
Speaking of history. He swallowed, venturing carefully, “So, I am afraid I don’t know how to ask without sounding rude but… how old are you, really?”
Shane shifted awkwardly, making a little squeak against the expensive-looking leather armchair behind him. “Well, I stopped aging around thirty as you know, though we didn’t really count Gregorian years at the time. And that was about… 1017? In Japan, right at the start of the Kannin era.” He chuckled, as if he’d referenced some inside joke that had sailed far over Ilya’s head. “Not that that era lasted very long anyway.”
1017 made the math pretty damn easy, Ilya nearly choking at the realization. “Wait, shit, are you really claiming to be more than a thousand years old? That would make you—”
“One of the Few, yes,” Shane affirmed, looking sheepish, “My mother is Yuna. And my father was an NBV, though much younger. And Caucasian. If, um, you were wondering.”
Ilya froze, resisting the urge to hang up the call entirely. Yuna. Mother of mothers. He was speaking to the son of one of the first recorded vampires in human history. And a few days ago, he’d sort of offered to suck his Royal Vampire dick for money. Jesus Christ.
“What the hell are you doing in Canada?” he blurted, sucking in breaths that he didn’t technically need out of panicked habit. As far as he knew, the Few largely kept their business abroad. And most of them hadn't been seen in decades, if not centuries.
Shane shrugged. “Needed a change. And I really like hockey.”
Hockey. Ilya felt lightheaded. This ancient, allegedly all-powerful being was sat on FaceTime with him, calmly explaining that he’d posted up in rural Lanaudière as a sports fan.
“What brought you to Canada?” Shane questioned, as if expecting Ilya to continue a perfectly normal conversation knowing his potential bloodsucking sugar daddy was older than the Magna Carta. “School, I assume? I noticed McGill in your bio and in your email, obviously, when I sent the money over.” He smiled, adding a cheerful, “I hope you paid your rent!”
“I will send the money back,” Ilya said quickly, voice gaining volume in the end as his panic grew, “Once I have it, I swear. I just need the university to pay me for the course I teach at the end of term and I can—”
“What, no. Ilya, hey,” Shane cut in, frowning, “The money is yours, keep it. I have plenty, I promise you. Five thousand isn't even a drop in the bucket. And you’re doing me a favor with the fake dates anyway, remember?”
Oh god, Ilya was meant to keep seeing this man. To take $30,000 from him by helping him con his extremely influential family.
“From your messages, I thought your mother was a little, ah, overbearing about your love life,” he hissed back, incredulous, voice pitching up, up, up with a shrill, “Not that she was an immortal de facto ruler who could literally kill me with her mind!”
The force of Shane’s wince was visible even on the small screen. “That’s… a rumor.”
Ilya huffed out a laugh, scrubbing at his face. “But is it true, Shane? This feels like a thing I should know before I go along with your plan. I am just a poor fledgling. And now I have to worry that Queen Goddess of Vampires is going to eat my organs!?”
“Okay, whoa, the human sacrifice thing with the organ harvesting was a brief and regrettable period of our history,” Shane argued, missing the point of Ilya’s line of questioning entirely, “She didn’t ask the Aztecs to do all that. It was, like, a spiritual mistranslation.”
“A mistranslation,” Ilya murmured, choking out another anxious laugh, “Of course.”
In the FaceTime window, Shane appeared to shrink in on himself, looking incongruously shy and small for the power he could wield. “So… did you still want to do dinner tomorrow? I’ll transfer the other half of your payment now if it would help, plus more after? And, if it makes you feel any better, I just want to send photo proof to my mom that I’m putting myself out there.” His face scrunched up all cutely again, god dammit. “You definitely will not have to meet her.”
Ilya stared back at him, emotions swirling: he was baffled by the audacity and tempted by the money, of course, and terribly curious about Shane as a person, and still horny, unfortunately, in spite of the danger. (And maybe, a little because of it, too.) He heard Svetlana’s voice in the back of his mind screaming ‘no, no, no’ which was precisely why he met Shane’s eyes and said, “Yes. Dinner. Okay.”
Shane smiled back so big that his fangs seemed to sparkle in the warm light of what was presumably his living room, and then he whispered, “Yay.”
Ilya was an idiot.
He was also very, very endeared.
“So, uh, who’s your favorite NHL team?” he asked, as if getting to know any other prospective date in conversation — one his age, and in his tax bracket, for example.
“The Voyageurs,” Shane replied, looking eager about the hockey talk, “I remember watching them win their first Stanley Cup over the Rosebuds. What a triumph!”
The 1916 Stanley Cup, Ilya thought with a wince, though he nodded back enthusiastically.
Right, okay, the age thing was going to take some getting used to.
But it was just three dates, no sex involved, and then more financial freedom than he had known in years, since being cut off from his family’s wealth for daring to pursue his own interests over blind servitude to the Council at least.
Three dates. Thirty-thousand-fucking-dollars.
He’d be the best fake-ish blood baby Shane had ever seen.
$10,000 richer and sat in the fanciest restaurant he had ever been permitted in, aside from the Council’s awful, stuffy banquets of course, Ilya privately thought their first date was going quite well.
Shane was sweet, if a little ill-socialized, and he found almost everything Ilya said very funny in a way that was extremely good for his ego. And he was hot. So, so hot, with his dark waves and full lips and impeccably tailored suit. It was distracting Ilya from the fact that they were only here to take a few staged pictures for Shane’s Instagram and that he wasn’t otherwise obligated to flirt or reach out to touch or to imagine Shane naked and bent over the back of one of the red leather booths, Ilya’s face between his cheeks.
Distraction. Quick.
“Hey, we’re both millennials, in a way,” Ilya joked, making Shane snort out another laugh. He’d said it in Russian too, thrilled earlier in the evening to learn that Shane spoke his mother tongue in a fluent though slightly archaic fashion and had lived, very briefly, in Moscow as well. Five hundred years before Ilya was born, but whatever.
And actually, the age difference didn’t really feel all that significant, in maturity at least, with the way Shane spoke and acted more like an extremely offline young adult and not the ancient old man he technically was. It became clear as they conversed that entire eras of modern meme culture had passed him by and Ilya was distraught to learn that he’d never seen a single Vine before the app had shuttered in January, vowing to text Shane a bunch of compilations afterward to rectify that immediately.
“So you’re in school right now?” Shane asked around polite bites of his allergen-free, vamp-digestible sashimi, which Ilya had learned could be dipped in blood just like soy sauce. Delicious, though it made for a harrowing visual experience.
“Yes,” he replied, “I’m in what I hope is the last year of my PhD program. If all goes well in the next six months, I’ll finally be a Doctor of Cryptid Sciences.”
“Neat,” Shane said, eyes lighting up in genuine interest, “What’s your dissertation about?”
Though his face was more expressive, he spoke in a sort of robotic, monotonous way that Ilya was realizing was not, in fact, a spooky vampire bit, and which only served to endear him further.
“How Mothman travels through time and across dimensions, basically,” he replied, used to dumbing down the hard science parts of his thesis for a general audience.
“Oh, well, have you asked him?” Shane prompted, then immediately grimaced, “Or, well, them, I think? They don’t really have the same concept of gender that we do.”
Ilya blinked. Grateful for the ability to speak more technically in Russian, he continued slowly, “Shane, Mothman’s existence hasn’t been confirmed beyond a series of alleged human sightings in the Sixties. My realm of cryptozoological physics is purely theoretical.”
Shane stared back at him. “Of course Mothman is real. And there’s actually like seven of them, maybe eight? Though I’ve only met the main one.” He frowned. “But I guess it’s not that helpful to talk to them now, since you’re nearly done with your paper anyway.”
Ilya closed his eyes for a moment, took a deep unnecessary breath, and tried not to immediately mourn the collapse of his entire academic career. “No, that would… probably set me back quite a bit, you’re right.”
Finishing another bite of ‘salmon,’ Shane appeared to be contemplating something deeply, before he leaned halfway across the table, beckoning Ilya forward too. “They’re actually not that cheeked up,” he whispered, raising a hand to conceal his mouth as if Mothman might appear at any moment to sue for slander.
“Devastating news,” Ilya deadpanned in English, though he’d always privately harbored suspicions about the statue’s authenticity. A SidCros-like center of gravity would have significantly impaired Mothman’s time warp ability, so if Shane was to be believed, Ilya could be grateful that he wouldn’t one day need to amend his calculations to account for the pull of the ass. The fact that Mothman conclusively existed and was capable of conversation, according to the ancient man in front of him at least, was another mind fuck entirely.
“So how do you like being a vampire?” Shane asked a little later, waving his chopsticks cheerily, “Happy three month Bite-versary by the way.”
Ilya winced, falling into Russian again as sharper emotions broiled under the surface. “Ah, it’s fine. I’ve always had vampire friends so I didn’t harbor any prejudices or anything. But I wouldn’t say my Bite was really something to celebrate.”
Shane sat up a little, raising a brow. “Oh? I mean, I’d noticed you weren’t Mated obviously, or even Claimed. But I didn’t want to assume…”
Ilya sighed, tugging at the sleeves of his too-fancy button down in discomfort. “It’s… complicated. Or, well, I guess not really. I just… the last few years have been rough. My father got sick and so I was sending extra money back home for his care. I’ve long been cut off from accessing the Rozanov fortune, and my idiot brother would rather piss it away on luxury cars and women and an expensive drug habit than meet any sort of familial obligation. And then, my father died, so I went to Moscow for the funeral and got a little fucked up. Next thing you know I’m balls deep in some aristocratic twink in the back room of a vamp club and I’m asking him to bite me, or at least I think I asked, obviously assuming he would heal it properly and then… well.” He paused, doing jazz hands as if to say, ‘Here I am, all vampy now’ and shrugged. “I tried to talk to him about it later, but he told me I wanted it. And that I had probably messed with the wound after, so it was not his fault. I don’t know. It was… messy.”
Shane, all smiles all evening, looked very different by the end of Ilya’s story. His already dark eyes had gone pitch black, whites barely visible as the pupil eclipsed the space beneath his lids. Ilya shivered at the sight, something primal within his new vampire DNA recognizing the sheer power there.
“Name,” Shane whispered, voice low and deadly, “Give me a name, Ilya.”
Ilya hesitated, a little frightened now by the intensity of Shane’s pitch black gaze. “Ah, it was Alexander Kondratov. But his family is very powerful. His father was on the Council, though he’s on the run now, so I wouldn’t worry about it. I didn’t file a police report or anything anyway.”
Shane ignored him and went almost unnaturally still, his eyes somewhere far away, and remained in that quiet state for so long that Ilya began to worry. Eventually though, he blinked back to full awareness, and murmured, “What happened to you goes against our code of conduct. I am so sorry you were not given a real choice.”
“That’s… um, thank you,” Ilya said uneasily, a little unsure of what had just happened in the time that Shane had appeared to drift, “And the rest of the vampire stuff is okay, really. I like being stronger and faster. The endurance is useful for lots of things.” He winked, trying to lighten the mood, and was pleased when Shane’s cheeks pinked at the innuendo. “I just wish I wasn’t so hungry all the time. My Thirst has been terrible.”
At that, Shane frowned again. “But you’re three months old, nearly four. You should feel a lot more control with your feedings now. And be able to go longer between them.”
Ilya gnawed at his lip, shrugging, “I haven’t… fed properly yet. I was worried I’d like fresher human blood too much and I can’t afford those premium bags. Or, I couldn’t until now I guess. You’re helping the grocery budget a lot. I’ve just been on synth-blood supplements from the university health clinic since I Turned.”
Shane looked horrified. “You’ve never tasted real blood?”
Ilya gestured to the soy sauce dish of human O neg in front of him, saying, “Well, I have now, a little bit. This place is really nice by the way.”
Shane was shaking his head, aghast, and speaking in French now. Ilya wondered if he made the switch purposefully or if, after a millennium of being a polyglot, all of human language blended into something instinctual. “No, that’s… that’s impossible. You should have been so overcome by the Thirst at this point that you could’ve killed someone.”
Ilya shrank in on himself a little, thinking of his grad student struggle meals, and going days sometimes between real, nutritious food when he’d sent over more to his father’s memory care facility than he could really afford. “Ah, well, I’m used to being pretty hungry? If that makes a difference?”
“Give me your address,” Shane instructed, in crisp English again, making Ilya startle.
“What? Why?” he spluttered, tempted by a bizarre laugh when the thousand year old man before him rolled his eyes, exasperated, and muttered what was clearly the Japanese equivalent of ‘so help me god.’
“Because we need to get out of here so you can feed. Properly. Address, please.”
“That doesn’t seem very safe,” Ilya argued.
Shane looked at him, expression intense again. “Ilya, I already know your address. But I’m being really polite by asking for it, so I don’t freak you out.”
Ilya gulped, more turned on by the authoritative tone and the undercurrent of possessive creepiness than was sensible. Plus, Shane had earlier alluded to teleportation on his presumably long list of ancient powers and Ilya was extremely intrigued from a purely scientific standpoint, of course.
“Okay, take us there then.”
Shane reached across the table, threaded their fingers together, and tore them from reality with a single blink.
They blipped back in a little haphazardly, tumbling over the edge of Ilya’s couch where luckily Shane caught them before they fell to the floor.
“Sorry,” Ilya coughed out, sprawled halfway across Shane with his other half on a lumpy throw pillow, laughing a little, “Not a lot of space in here. Really have to stick the landing.”
They untangled themselves, sitting awkwardly now, each on their own sofa cushion.
“You should eat,” Shane urged after a moment, looking at him meaningfully.
Ilya shrugged. “I guess we could go out and find someone. There are a few feeder clubs nearby I’ve been too nervous to hit up alone. Might be helpful to have a scary chaperone with me.”
Shane’s eyes went dark again, the whites gone entirely. “No,” he said, and his voice boomed with the spell of compulsion.
Ilya felt nauseous at the familiar pull to obey, scrubbing at his arms as the instruction settled into his skin, itchy and wrong.
“Don’t,” he said through gritted teeth, “Don’t fucking use that on me.”
It would have been a violation regardless, but still, Shane had no way of knowing how Ilya’s childhood had progressed, his father remarrying after his mother’s death to a powerful vampire who was all too willing to use her talent for persuasion to mold an errant stepson into obedience. Even so, Ilya had never felt a strength like Shane’s before, and he was briefly struck with the terror of becoming another cautionary tale for online dating. Shane could hurt him, kill him even, and apparently very, very easily.
Ilya thought about the knife block in his kitchen, accessible in just a few quick steps, but then hesitated when he saw that the vampire in front of him looked positively distraught by his own actions.
“I’m sorry, oh my god, shit,” Shane was babbling, eyes clear once more, “I did not mean to compel you, I swear. I would never, will never. Haven’t lost control like that in, god, maybe since JJ passed. I don’t—” He reached out to touch Ilya’s arm, a sense of immediate, healing relief pulsing over his flesh at the spell breaking contact. “I’m really, really sorry. I just… I brought you somewhere more private because I thought you could feed from me.”
Ilya froze, regarding Shane like the crazy person he obviously was. He swore, defaulting to Russian again between them as he protested, “Are you kidding? Feeding from another vampire when you’re not Mated is like… a known taboo.”
Shane waved a flippant hand. “I practically wrote half the vampire rulebook. I think in extenuating circumstances, it’s totally allowed.”
He rolled up his sleeve, presenting his wrist, where the pulse-less yet paradoxically rejuvenating blood lay pooling beneath. So fresh and sweet that even Ilya’s still mediocre hunting instincts could sense the juiciest vein calling out to him.
“Go ahead,” Shane said softly, no compulsion in his voice this time, “You can take as much as you need. It won’t hurt me like the others if you lose control a bit.”
Ilya felt his fangs begin to throb at the gums, a Thirst like nothing he’d experienced thus far erupting from his stomach to coat his throat with a bile-like burn. He was so, so hungry. Had he always been this hungry? Practically starving below the surface?
Maybe one little sip wouldn’t hurt. Just to try.
He leaned forward, all slack-jawed and nearly drooling by the time his teeth grazed the thin skin at Shane’s wrist.
“Gentle, little one,” Shane coaxed, almost maternally, in a way that sounded for a moment so much like Ilya’s faded memories of his birth mother that he wanted to cry.
He obeyed, biting down just hard enough to break the skin, bracing for a wince from Shane that never came. He hovered there for a moment, feeling awkward as he worked out how to suck properly, the sensation so different from sipping on the straws that came with his blood bags. And then, finally, the first drops of Shane’s blood hit his tongue and Ilya… Ilya felt…
Fucking hell. He was hard almost instantly.
The taste was euphoric, well-rounded in a way that synth-blood could never be, giving him a head rush that he hadn’t seen described in any of his online research on vamp4vamp couplings. We must be very compatible, he considered, then groaned when Shane, maybe sensing his arousal through their connection, lifted his arm and moved Ilya partway into his lap. His clothed cock slid against Shane’s beautiful, thick thigh, and he moaned around the bite, feeling as if he could come from that brief contact alone. He drank and drank, greedy for the food but also for the unexpected pleasure.
Don’t be selfish, he mentally chastised himself, but Shane, gone eerily quiet, was still not pushing him off.
“You can take what you need, baby bat,” Shane murmured, as if reading his thoughts (and fuck, maybe he could, Ilya hadn’t considered that) shifting his thigh in a purposeful manner, Ilya moaning at the friction, “I mean it.”
Ilya sucked harder and shuddered, the soothing elixir of Shane’s blood coating his tongue and easing the burn all the way down his ragged throat. God, this was so embarrassing, the way he was about to come in his pants at his first proper feeding, the veritable Prince of Vampires holding him through it, free hand in his curls now and massaging gently.
“Tastes so much better, doesn’t it?” Shane prompted, voice pitched low and soothing, “The real thing, from the source?”
Moaning around Shane’s wrist again, Ilya forced his fangs back, cutting himself off. He watched, awed, as Shane’s skin sealed over immediately, no need for the lave of a soft tongue to soothe the puncture wounds shut.
“You said no sex,” Ilya murmured, head spinning from the sensation of blessed fullness in his stomach and the heavy ache of his cock still gently humping Shane’s leg.
There was a hum, Shane’s hand stilling in his hair, where his fingers too had continued their ministrations.
“What I meant was that I didn’t want you to feel pressured to do anything for money,” Shane corrected, “But also, that was a copy-paste message, I admit. I just needed a plausible date with someone and soon. I didn’t expect…”
He trailed off, swallowing visibly when Ilya tilted his head up to meet those dark eyes once more. Shane’s pupils were small, irises a golden brown and clearly circled in white, a sign that Ilya was coming to associate with relative calm.
“Didn’t expect…?” Ilya echoed in English. A language that often felt more hopeful than his Russian or meager French did.
“You,” Shane whispered back, that single word fluttering fragile in the air between them.
Ilya sat up, shifting until he was perched in Shane’s lap fully, surprising himself with the way he said, without a thought for their financial arrangement, “You should kiss me now I think.”
There was a sharp intake of breath. Silly and a little flattering given that Ilya hadn’t seen Shane respire reflexively even once that evening.
“Ilya, I—” Shane started, mouth so close to his own now that Ilya’s fangs were peeking out again, anticipating a different kind of taste.
The sounds of the city below seemed to fall away, nothing but the quiet rustle of their clothes as Shane came closer and closer. The tension was syrupy thick between them, Ilya frozen and waiting — for the first time in his life not being the bolder partner to make the first move. He wanted Shane to choose him, maybe. To take. Their power differential was haunting to him, reminiscent of his past in challenging ways, and yet, here he was, cock fat between his legs for a vampiric aristocrat anyhow.
The first brush of Shane’s lips was electrifying, Ilya shifting in his lap in anticipated ecstasy, and then it stopped.
Or rather, Shane stopped, his whole body going rigid in the way it had back at the restaurant. When Ilya leaned away, concerned, those warm eyes were all black again. Gone.
“Sorry, I have to go,” Shane murmured after a moment, “This was lovely though, I just—” He froze again, clearly fighting the call of something Ilya couldn’t see. “I’ll call you, okay. About the next date. Bye!”
And then, in a blink, he was gone, disappearing out from underneath Ilya like a magic trick.
Off balance and falling head first into the couch cushions, Ilya shoved his face into the nearest pillow at the same time that he shoved a hand down his pants, chanting ‘fuck, fuck, what the fuck’ before coming — dry, as his body always did now — with a confused yet blindingly orgasmic shudder of relief.
For the first time in months, even longer maybe, Ilya went to sleep on a full stomach.
When Ilya’s phone rang the next day, just as he was tucking in to the shipment of real human blood that had arrived not-so-mysteriously at his front door earlier that morning, he scrambled to answer it immediately.
“Shane, hi,” he breathed out, trying not to sound too eager.
“Who’s Shane?” Svetlana’s voice replied, Russian syllables floating curiously off her tongue, “Is that your mystery donor daddy?”
Ilya bit his lip. Ah, lips. Shane’s lips.
“Ilya?”
“What, no,” he blurted, recovering poorly, “Just… another student in my research seminar.”
“Right,” Svetlana said, clearly dubious, though she continued with a clipped, “Anyway, listen. I’m calling with good news.”
“Oh?”
“Alexander is dead, Ilya. They found him this morning.”
Ilya jolted. “How?”
“Self-inflicted, it seems,” she explained, sounding bored, as if reading out a local newspaper article on something mundane and not the apparent death of Ilya’s Sire, “He left a note apologizing to you and… to several others, unfortunately. Must have finally been overwhelmed by the guilt. Good fucking riddance.”
“Sveta…” Ilya began, a growing suspicion that there was more to the story.
Shaking his head at the temptation to spill, he bit down on his tongue instead. He needed to dodge Svetlana’s questions about his Donor for as long as possible, or at least until he could kiss Shane properly. Talking now meant too many opportunities for her to recognize the significance of Shane’s origins and then spend the rest of her extended undead life trying to dissuade him from his next Very Bad Idea. Not that she often succeeded, mind.
“You’re free, you know?” she said, unbothered by his silence, “He can’t ever Claim you now.”
Oh.
Ilya felt his shoulders droop, a weight he didn’t know he’d had resting there seeming to disappear in a Shane-like blink. In truth, he hadn’t allowed himself to consider the possibility of Alexander changing his mind, too wary of the idea rooting itself in his brain and leaving him constantly looking over his shoulder in fear that his Sire would decide he wanted Ilya as a mate after all.
“But what else is new with you?” he prompted, inelegantly changing the subject and letting Svetlana’s comforting chatter about the ‘idiots’ in her HBS course fill his ears.
Listening idly, Ilya tongued at his fangs, disappointed when he tasted only his breakfast there — a perfectly acceptable O+ — and searching still for the fading richness on his palate from the night before.
When he glanced at his reflection in the standing mirror near the door, he imagined his eyes were black from lid to lash line and shivered.
“Ilya, hello,” Shane greeted, having called Ilya late that same evening, presumably to discuss their second date.
“Did you kill a man for me?” he blurted, then grimaced. Well, so much for working up to it.
There was a long pause.
“No?” Shane said, though it ended in the notable upward inflection of a question mark.
“Shane.”
A longer pause, and then:
“Technically, he killed himself.”
Ilya blew out a faux-breath and said “Thank you” even as Shane was launching into a harried explanation, “—and he broke a sacred law, Ilya, so it was really just a matter of me being obligated to apply my extrajudicial discretion— wait, did you just thank me?”
“Yes,” Ilya said, laughing now, “and thank you for the blood too. O+ I noticed.”
“Thought you might appreciate the flavor,” Shane affirmed, adding in his adorable monotone, “Also, I would kill for you, to be clear, if I had to. Not saying that I did.”
“Cool,” Ilya said, fighting a smile, “but let’s save more murder for the third date maybe. How’s your mom?”
“Placated, for now,” Shane replied, his Russian smoother the longer he spoke it, “It’s working. Although I think I described you with a little too much enthusiasm, so… she’s feeling unfortunately optimistic that a new mating is on the horizon.”
“Oh,” Ilya said, a little hesitant. He liked Shane, for real probably, and wanted to kiss him properly after that very nice first date. But eternal matrimony under the Mother’s watchful eye was a bit…
“Oh, oh god no,” Shane hurried to clarify, “that is not me proposing to be your mate, fake or otherwise.”
My mate, Ilya’s heart sang, in spite of his logical denial. Fuck, what was happening to him?
“So, your house next?” he asked, shaking his head to clear out the strange fantasies.
“That’s the plan,” Shane affirmed, then hesitated, “Although in my original three part approach, I was just going to have you over to watch a hockey documentary.”
Ilya smiled. “And now?”
“Well, by Friday you might be hungry again,” Shane simpered, “And last feeding, you were so rudely interrupted by my business call.”
“I finished, after,” Ilya blurted, apparently lacking any filter at all now. He wondered for a moment if Shane had silently compelled him into telling the truth, but the itch of the spell was nowhere to be found.
“Oh, well as long as you got off,” Shane teased, making Ilya grateful for the way he couldn’t see Ilya’s cheeks redden through the phone. Or, well, he assumed so anyway. The mind reading and clairvoyance were still on the table. “So… hockey documentary, dinner, and then dessert?”
Ilya playfully booed. “Cheesy.”
“What? I might make a tiramisu,” Shane argued, laughing around the words.
He really was funny. How annoying.
“I want to kiss you again,” Ilya said, without embellishment, feeling more like himself and tired of being coy, “And fuck you, if that's on the table. Free of charge.”
“Love a discount,” Shane joked, voice quickly sobering, “But I’ll still pay you for the date as planned. Anything else is at your discretion.”
Ilya swallowed. “There’s a lot I’d like to do. To you, specifically.”
Shane wasted no time, countering with, “I’d let you.”
The knock on his door arrived precisely on time, Ilya smiling at the fact that Shane had chosen to be very politely, culturally human instead of simply poofing into the apartment like Ilya had assumed he might.
He grabbed his jacket and tugged the door open, taking in the handsome vampire before him, and noticing for the first time under the harsh white hallway bulb that Shane had a sprinkling of freckles across his cheekbones. Ilya hadn’t known that vampires, not as flammable as the old wives’ tales would have you believe but still somewhat sun averse, could have them. But maybe they'd been there before his aging came to a halt anyway. Whatever the cause, they were, much to Ilya's dismay, extremely cute.
Shane beamed back at him, prominent fangs hooking over his plush bottom lip. “Hi, ready to go?”
Ilya nodded, reaching out to let Shane thread their fingers together again. The distance was far enough this time, a few seconds’ worth of travel, that Ilya did feel a little dizzy when they popped back in. He felt dizzier still when he glanced around and realized that Shane’s definition of ‘modest, lakeside cottage home’ involved a lot more glass, expensive wood paneling, and square footage than Ilya’s did.
“This is beautiful,” he remarked, awestruck at both the home itself and Shane’s cozy interior design choices, all warm greens and browns and dark blues, hard surfaces covered by fuzzy patterned rugs and pillows and throw blankets, and the softest overhead lighting Ilya had ever been bathed in. He’d been silly, and leaning on stereotypes maybe, to assume that Shane would live in something coldly sleek and minimalist and monochrome like in all the modern vamp rom-coms or else a spooky, crumbling castle on the hillside with lightning striking its spires. No such similarities; this was a wonderful home that made it clear that it was well lived in.
“Thank you,” Shane replied, finally releasing his grasp on Ilya’s hand.
Ilya blushed, noticing only then that they’d left their fingers linked for far longer than necessary. He frowned, too, at how he immediately missed the sensation, mentally consulting vampqueen’s Tumblr post and realizing that it had been full of tips about what to do if your Donor started showing too much affection too soon, but nothing regarding a blood baby’s own feelings. Vampqueen seemed unconvinced that any Donor could be hot and kind and smart enough to be of true romantic interest; and while Ilya liked Shane’s money, liked it a lot actually with the way he’d been able to put down a deposit on a gorgeous one bedroom apartment in a luxury building with a lush, riverside view and hire movers to take care of all the work this week, he also… liked Shane. Full stop. Which was crazy given that Shane’s mom was still liable to kill him with her mind.
(A talent he had a sneaking suspicion that Shane had inherited.)
“So…” Shane said, shuffling his feet. He was dressed more casually than Ilya had seen him yet, ostensibly comfy for their planned night in, clad in black Prada joggers and a loose Voyageurs t-shirt with the number of forward Hayden Pike of all players on the sleeve. Ilya bit back a laugh, thinking it was nice to know that even primordial vampire royalty had shit taste sometimes.
“So…” Ilya echoed, teasing, and took a bold step forward, his hands coming up to grasp at Shane’s trim waist.
Now that he was mostly sure that Shane wasn’t a total creep and also wasn’t planning to sacrifice him in some secret ritual to please the Mother, Ilya felt a lot more confident in pursuing what he wanted. Which was primarily a residence between Shane’s ample ass cheeks, and then a whole host of things after that.
“The hockey documentary is ninety-four minutes long,” Shane blurted nervously, making Ilya laugh.
He blinked, brown eyes big and searching, fangs glinting in the low light.
And so Ilya kissed him.
It was sweet, the way Shane went so immediately pliant beneath his hands, and blindingly hot at the same time, knowing that the other man’s strength overpowered him by an impossible order of magnitude and yet Shane was clearly choosing not to exert a single drop of it. They melded together, the initial eagerness settling into something darkly magnetic in its intensity.
Ilya’s stomach chose that moment to growl, which would have been funny, except—
“Bite my lip,” Shane gasped out, and Ilya groaned, immediately sinking the tips of his fangs into the smooth skin there.
Blood oozed into their mouths, mixing with their saliva as Ilya practically drooled with the dual hunger of appetite and arousal, sealing their lips together more firmly to swap the liquids between them. He swiped a tongue over the puncture marks on Shane’s bottom lip, expecting barely a bump, his brows furrowing in confusion when Shane’s skin didn’t heal immediately like his wrist had before. Instead, more blood flooded in, rich and sweet and dripping down his chin as it leaked out the corners of his mouth. Ilya’s own veins sang with the taste of Shane in return, calling out for the other man on a cellular level, brain approaching a state of near-euphoria just as he had on the couch for his first feed. He probably looked like the monster that he was now, inside and out, feral with blood lust. He felt insane. He felt perfect.
After a moment, Ilya pulled back slightly, meeting Shane’s wild eyes, and asked, “Are you okay?”
Shane nodded, a picture of pure desire, the rusty smear of his own blood painting his lips and chin like a Rorschach inkblot, matching Ilya’s own.
“I let it bleed, on purpose,” he explained, shrugging as if he hadn’t just admitted to a degree of control over his own biological processes that shouldn’t have been possible. At Ilya’s unspoken ‘why?’ he added simply, teeth stained red, “You’re hungry.”
A thousand different ways of calling Shane crazy and intense and fucking wonderful flitted across his mind’s eye, but Ilya swiped it all away, reaching forward instead to grab at Shane’s bloodied jawline to fit their mouths back together with ease. They kissed and Ilya drank and he felt so hard in his own sweats that he thought he might die. Again.
All of a sudden, Shane pulled away, dropping to his knees as if Ilya had compelled him to and tugging down Ilya’s pants and underwear in one fell swoop.
“Shane… wha—?” he choked out, sentence broken off by the way Shane’s mouth was on him immediately, two gentler passes around the head before he was being swallowed down to the root.
Ilya was dying again, in fact, even if Cliff had said that it was basically impossible. No one could possibly feel like this and survive.
One of Shane's hands reached up to palm at Ilya’s thigh for balance and the other he shoved between his own legs. Below him, Shane looked gorgeous and focused, those expressive brows furrowing as he worked his mouth up and down Ilya’s shaft. His eyes were nearly black again, as they flicked up to meet Ilya’s own, but there was a sparkle to them this time. Not anger or overwhelm, then. Just a galaxy-like swirl of stars and inky black matter. Pure sex.
The sharp nails of Shane’s left hand cut into his thigh as Shane burrowed his nose into the wiry hair at the base of Ilya’s cock, swallowing again and again without the need for air. Registering the sting, Ilya looked at the four parallel red scratch lines down his leg and felt his mind white out with pleasure.
“Harder,” he hissed, a hand twisting into Shane’s hair to yank his head back, that perfect mouth panting up at him, “Eat.”
Shane practically keened at the instruction, his pointer finger reaching up to nick the skin, a fat droplet of blood welling up at the surface. He lapped at the oozing wound, Ilya so close to coming untouched now it was madness, and then nosed further into the space between Ilya’s inner thigh and groin. Dragging his fangs along the sensitive skin there, Shane made a questioning sound, humming happily when Ilya begged ‘yes, yes, yes’ in response. His jaw shifted, cheek brushing against Ilya’s sack in a way that made him shiver, before the full force of Shane’s bite was sinking into his flesh.
Two moans echoed in the air, overlapping, one low and muffled and one so throaty and prolonged it was nearly operatic.
Blacked out with pleasure for a timeless moment, Ilya was shocked to find he was still standing, the sensation of Shane feeding from him overstimulating in the best way.
“AB negative,” Shane gasped out wetly, mouthing at his thigh and then his balls, and finally tracing a tongue all the way back up his shaft, cleaning up the last droplets of blood as if they were cum instead. His attention to detail was going to drive Ilya to insanity. “Fuck, Ilya. That’s… I haven’t tasted it in decades.” Shane’s eyes darkened, tongue licking at his lips in a way that might've looked sleazy but read to Ilya as pure, charismatic filth instead. “You’re decadent.”
Ilya shivered, never in his formerly human life thinking that he’d be so pleased at being called delicious by a supernatural creature that could drain him dry.
From his place on the floor, Shane murmured, “Let me show you the bedroom. Or one of them, at least.”
“Closest one,” Ilya instructed, smiling when Shane rose to his feet with a laugh, intertwined their hands, and teleported them upstairs.
They fell onto a bed in a giggling heap, Ilya murmuring ‘neat trick’ into Shane’s collarbone. Wrestling around a bit, their mouths grew slick and swollen again from where they were connected, bloody kisses singing with violent delight.
“Fuck me,” Shane urged, and threw a hand out, Ilya watching in awe as the bedside drawer slid open on its own and a bottle of lube — plasma-flavored, he noted with a laugh — appeared on the duvet in front of him.
“Oh, so we are doing telekinesis now,” he noted dryly, slicking up two fingers with practiced efficiency, “Anything else?”
Shane rolled over onto his hands and knees and assumed a perfect arch. “After. I’ll write you a list.”
Ilya huffed in amusement, before swiping a wet finger across Shane’s rim, smile growing when the motion punched a particularly needy moan out of the man. Sliding back on the bed, he ducked down and inserted one finger, tongue coming up to trace at the puckered skin around the entrance. Shane yelped, singing out a series of gorgeous moans as Ilya alternated fingers and tongue, stretching him quickly. He would take his time another day, peel Shane apart layer by layer until he was begging for it, on their third and final date he supposed. Shaking his head at the uncomfortable idea of this ending, he refocused, eating ass like he was getting paid. And then laughed. Because he was.
“In me,” Shane hissed, clearly impatient, “Haven’t been fucked properly in two hundred years. Need it right now.”
Ilya hesitated at that, twisting his fingers deeper, and contemplating a third even. “Ah, but we should go slow then. I don’t want to hurt you.”
Shane fucked himself back on Ilya’s hand with a groan, one arm flinging out again so that a remarkably large purple dildo flew from the same nightstand and smacked Ilya in the face before falling gently to the comforter. “I’ll be fine,” Shane emphasized through gritted teeth, claws shredding into the bedding like a wild animal, “Now fuck me, Ilya. Before I kill you with my mind. I’m thinking about it.”
It was a testament to how well he was beginning to understand Shane’s strange undead humor that Ilya simply laughed in the face of the existential threat. Tossing the truly impressive dildo off the edge of the bed with a snort, he slicked himself up, palming at Shane’s pretty round cheeks in appreciation.
“Baby bat…” Shane warned, whatever he meant to say next cut off by the way he pitched forward into the pillows at the crack of Ilya’s hand across his backside. “Oh, fuck.”
“Yes, I am getting to it, daddy,” Ilya replied cheekily, laughing again when Shane murmured ‘ugh, not that’ with palpable disdain.
“Hmm, no, you’re right,” he mused, pressing his tip to Shane’s hole and rubbing there, all too pleased with how Shane continued to grumble at the teasing, “What should I call you then, Sire?”
It was a slip of the tongue, maybe, Ilya surprising himself with the word that had plagued him for months. A word he thought would haunt him for the rest of his and Alexander’s long lives.
But Alexander was dead.
And the man, the ancient being, who had avenged Ilya’s honor was arched in front of him, vulnerable and wanting.
“Oh,” Shane said lowly, and Ilya could feel him turning the word over in his mind, “That’s right, little one. I made you. Fed you. Not him.”
Ilya shuddered, affirming with a whisper of ‘No, not him’ as he pressed into Shane’s tight, wet heat. The moment was miraculous, mind-blowing, as seamless as every second of their intimate connection had been thus far. This, for eternity, Ilya’s sex-drunk mind whispered, and he tore into his bottom lip, fangs aching with the urge to bite a permanent mark into Shane’s neck.
“Move, Ilya, please,” Shane huffed, already fucking himself back onto Ilya’s not-insubstantial cock with ease.
“Yes, Sire.” Not a hint of irony this time.
He grabbed at the dip of Shane’s hips and thrust forward properly now, spitting down onto the place where Shane was stretched around him. His saliva came out tinged pink with blood. Pretty.
“Pretty,” he repeated aloud, fucking Shane hard enough to leave the vamp face down and choking out moans, “Look at you, taking me like you were made for it. Like you made me just to fuck you best, hmm?”
“Yes,” Shane cried out, the slap of skin echoing the rhythm of his words as he babbled, “My fledgling, feeding and fucking me so well.”
Ilya’s thighs were shaking now with the effort, drilling Shane into the mattress with an obsessive eagerness to please. “Teach me, Sire,” he murmured, “Tell me how to get you there.”
“Hand on my cock,” Shane gasped, arching deeper, “And then I need you to trust me.”
“I do.” The reply was automatic, instinctual, and Ilya found that he meant it.
He folded over Shane, feeling himself slide impossibly deeper, and wrapped a hand around Shane’s gorgeous length, angry and purple-red with neglect. Shane keened, whole body shaking with the added sensation, Ilya stopping at the head to rub a cruel thumb there and easing up only once Shane was begging for mercy.
Then, Shane stilled and there was a sudden sense of oddity in the air, a prickle at the back of his neck. Something prodding.
“Feel,” Shane whispered.
And then Ilya did.
He felt everything.
His own pleasure and Shane’s pleasure and then, impossibly, every living thing in a hundred kilometer radius, farther even, their heartbeats singing in his ears. He drifted, a whole universe splayed out before him. Could Shane really see this all the time? And how could he bear it? The vastness of existence was—
Focus.
And, oh. That was Shane inside his mind, he thought deliriously, while he was physically inside Shane. How strange and wonderful and—
Ilya. Please.
There was amusement in the thought, and then desperation too, a hunger to be held down and taken. Ilya, not really one to bottom, had never known this ache himself, but he felt the urge to soothe it more than ever. Understood the emptiness on a metaphysical level. The need to be filled.
The wide world of Shane’s mind narrowed to a pinprick dot of pleasure, Ilya responding in kind with the rhythmic, piston-like movement of his hips. He knew when Shane was about to come just as he knew he was mere seconds behind, their orgasms overlapping in waves of pleasure, echoing back and forth across whatever strange connection Shane had built for them. The waves crashed to the shoreline, Ilya shaking and shaking, Shane crying out in an endless stream of language — Russian and French and Japanese and things too ancient for Ilya to know. And then there was a tugging sensation, and the rubber band snap of Ilya returning to a mind that was only his own.
Disoriented, he heard Shane’s voice, low and soothing all around him.
And then, maybe right away or hours later, he slept.
Ilya blinked awake, back in his own creaky bed, the rest of the apartment covered in a chaotic maze of boxes and items tagged for the move. Tuesday. Just three more days here.
Glancing around the space, he felt disappointed when he remembered that Shane had dropped him off late last night and not lingered, citing more mysterious business to attend to. Which was okay, and all fine, of course. There was no reason for his Si— his Donor to stay the night, sleepovers not part of the pre-paid date package. Not that they’d discussed anyway. But neither was the sex though, at first, to be fair.
Ilya smiled in spite of the lonely ache in his chest, muscles sore from exertion, and was pleased when he glanced down to see the tiniest bit of pink remaining on his thigh from where Shane had raked his claws in. The second date had been even better than the first, obviously, with the addition of that physical dynamic. And, after an indulgent post-sex nap, they’d spent the rest of their time together largely as planned, if in the reverse order, dessert into dinner with the documentary tabled for date number three.
Appetite returning, Ilya had practiced drinking from Shane’s thigh in moderation, sat back on his heels between Shane’s spread legs as he’d sucked carefully. He’d only gotten a little hard again, proud of his restraint, until Shane’s bare foot had wandered to his tenting crotch and pressed down, massaging Ilya into his second orgasm of the night. He’d sucked Shane into his mouth right after, grateful for the chance to taste his Sire in all his dimensions, blood and sweat and the watery, sugar sweet cum that NBVs produced, allowing them to continue their familial lines. Being Turned, Ilya would never Sire another, and for that he was grateful, petrified by the responsibility in a way that Shane seemed to take in stride.
“I’ve never had another in my line,” Shane had whispered, spilling down Ilya’s throat, “Only you.”
And Ilya hadn’t cared in that moment, didn’t care now, that they were only role playing that connection. He’d felt Shane in his blood and in his mind. They’d been joined inextricably, in their strange and taboo way.
They also had just one date left.
Ilya shook his head, pulling himself from bed and padding over to the shower, knowing that he needed to spend several hours today editing a chapter of his dissertation. His advisor had been patient at first, recognizing that Ilya needed time to adjust to his new nature, and he’d luckily already been well ahead of schedule on his experiments and data collection, always in fear of when his father’s declining health might force him back to Moscow for extended periods. But there were real deadlines approaching for revisions and committee review and post-doc plans, all these steps ensuring that by spring he’d be on track to submit a final draft and prepare for his defense. So Ilya needed to kick his own butt into gear.
Daydreaming over some kind of permanent arrangement with the guy he had met on a sugar daddy app, in search of money to keep his academic dreams alive, was not a worthwhile distraction. Finishing his PhD and proving his doubters wrong was the real pursuit, two letters to put in front of his name — human or not — like a huge ‘F U’ to his father’s rotting corpse. Grigori would’ve hated to see him as a vampire, maybe even more so than the queerness he’d always suspected in his son, with how he considered being a human deemed worthy enough to serve the Council to be a great honor, while the actual act of Turning was a shortcut against one’s biological nature, an admission of weakness even. He’d gone to his grave in agony, refusing the Bite from Ilya’s stepmother, and Ilya couldn’t pretend to understand the cognitive dissonance there.
But then again, maybe that’s exactly why he’d gone out after the funeral that night.
An hour later and Ilya was leaving the apartment complex, on his way to Schulich Library with his laptop and revision materials in tow, headphones over his ears as he felt the slight prickle of the late afternoon sunlight on his sensitive skin. The prickle intensified, Ilya momentarily worried that his SPF 50 hadn’t been sufficiently applied, before he recognized the spell of compulsion for what it was.
No.
He felt his steps slow and then take him in a different direction. Gritting his teeth, he walked, not of his own volition, toward a cafe on the edge of the university campus, stomach churning with the violation. Perched in a chair at one of the outdoor tables, a woman raised a hand and waved at him, her jet black hair swaying unnaturally slowly in the wind, seeming almost to float around her. Her teeth were sharp, vampiric, and in an instant Ilya knew exactly who he was looking at.
They had the same eyes.
“Ilya,” she greeted as he approached and then, surprising him in perfect Russian, added, “Have a seat, won’t you?”
“Nice of you to offer,” he said dryly and with more bravado than perhaps was advisable, wincing as his muscles contracted and forced his body into the chair, “Given I have no choice.”
In a blink, he felt the spell release its hold.
“Oh, yes, of course. Sorry about that,” she replied mildly, not sounding particularly apologetic at all. Making a tsk tsk noise against her teeth, she instructed, “But don’t run. It’s always less pleasant when they run.”
“You’re Yuna,” he said, watching her eyes widen with curiosity.
“Oh, I see,” she murmured, apparently noting something that was invisible to Ilya’s basic vamp brain. “Yes, that is one name for what I am anyway. Shane has mentioned me?”
Ilya gnawed at his lip, distinctly uncomfortable with navigating this conversation without Shane here to referee. Shane, if you can hear me, help, please, he thought as loudly as he could, feeling foolish at the effort.
“He mentioned that you care a lot about him,” he told her diplomatically, “And that you’re worried he’s lonely.”
“He is lonely,” Yuna said brusquely, “He fled to Canada two centuries ago and he’s barely left that house since. JJ could have been an... adequate partner, but I told him when they got together that the Original Few don’t live like your kind. We’ll live forever, if we like, and most vampires will have a few hundred years at best. Unless we mate them, of course, and then our blood does extend things a bit.” She sighed, waving a sharply manicured hand. “He never listens.”
Ilya blinked, taking all of that in. “Shane wasn’t mated?”
Yuna rolled her eyes. “JJ wouldn’t let him do it. Saccharine fool. He had the gift of prophetic sight and was always saying that a greater, forever love was on the horizon for Shane.” She looked Ilya up and down, taking in his slightly grubby study outfit, and remarked, “I don’t suppose you think that’s you.”
Ilya’s hackles rose at the implication. Sure, he probably didn’t look like much now, but he had an upper crust pedigree, a top tier education, and fulfilling hobbies and friendships besides. The only thing he didn’t have was money. And as a Donor, Shane had chosen him, amongst probably hundreds of similar matches on the Bloodbanker$ app. That had to count for something.
“Respectfully, we’ve only been on two dates,” Ilya said evenly, surprised when a waiter swept by and placed an iced latte with his preferred milk and syrups in front of him. He refused to consider how Yuna knew his coffee order. “I don’t think either of us is at ‘forever love’ status yet.”
Yuna hummed, her sharp eyes regarding him thoughtfully. “He’s been sending you money.”
Jesus, she really didn’t let up. Ilya fought every nerve in his body in order to suppress a startled reaction. “He’s… yes. I was living in a Human Only apartment and had to move out unexpectedly after I was Turned. Shane was kind enough to help me with those expenses. But I told him I would return it once the university pays me for the course I teach at the end of the term.”
He fought a wince when Yuna didn’t reply for a long time, fearful that she hadn’t bought his mostly true retelling of events.
“Do you like my son, Ilya?” she asked eventually, leaning back in her chair and sipping at her iced lavender matcha, a choice so modern and incongruent with her god-like origins that it almost made him smile.
He hesitated again. It seemed wrong not to tell Shane first. And yet, he knew somehow that this impression was important.
“I do,” he said, smiling to himself, “He’s so funny. Handsome, obviously. Sweet too and a little… odd, in the best way.” He swallowed. “I want him to be happy. Even if that is not with me. And if it doesn’t work out, I’d like to be friends at least.”
“And the vast wealth he possesses?”
Ilya shrugged. “It is nice to have but… I come from a rich family.” Eyeing her carefully, he added, “And I have a feeling you already know that. But I left them to do my own thing, survived here since I was eighteen, on scholarships and second jobs. I would do all that again, to live freely like I do now.”
Yuna was quiet for another long moment, eyeing him again in that stripped bare way of hers. He realized then that her irises were much darker than Shane’s, a deep red-brown, like a blood stain. He sipped his iced coffee, in the appearance of nonchalance, and fought a shiver.
“I met your father a few times, visiting the Council,” she said, apropos of nothing, “Not a very nice man.”
Ilya choked out an ugly, shocked sound, recovering with a quiet, “No, ah, he wasn’t.”
She tilted her head. “You’re not like him.”
Ilya winced, wondering if she had any idea just how deeply that comparison cut. “No, I’m not.”
“Good,” she replied, finishing her drink with one last sip, “My son thinks I am a fool, sending me these pictures of your so-called dates. Paying for your time. But… he looks happy. That’s all I ask.”
Ilya gulped, caught. “I—”
“Keep him happy, Ilya,” she cut in, tossing an excessive stack of bills on the table for just two drinks.
He watched her stand, so elegantly that she seemed to hover above the ground, before smoothing out her simple gray cashmere sweater, worn with a pair of high-waisted jeans and, of all things, white Keds sneakers. Smiling at him with a threatening display of sharp teeth, she wiggled her fingers in a cheery goodbye, and blinked out of sight.
Ilya finished his coffee and walked to the library in a daze, staring at his laptop screen for a solid hour before he wrote a single word.
A crate bearing another two weeks’ worth of O+ blood arrived at his doorstep the next day, despite Ilya’s reassurances to Shane over text that one harrowing conversation with his mother hadn’t chased him away forever. Shane had gone oddly silent after that, and Ilya began to worry that the reverse had happened, that somehow Yuna had convinced her son that Ilya was a bad idea after all. She’d certainly had enough to say about Shane’s previous NBV partner of several hundred years; how could two good dates with a Turned doctoral student even compare?
Still, he attempted to spend the day productively, sipping indulgently on half a blood bag and then running some errands, before returning to the apartment to finish the last bit of packing prep for the movers. He edited another tricky chapter of his dissertation, pleased with his progress, and then flopped onto his bed for a scroll through his socials.
It was at that moment, Ilya’s eyes fixated on his screen, that Shane chose to blip directly into the center of his studio.
Ilya dropped his phone as he jumped, hard edge hitting him in the face, and let out a creative string of Russian swears in surprise.
“Oh my god, I’m so sorry,” Shane said, looking harried, “I meant to knock but then I was freaking out a little and I just wanted to see you and so….” He gestured to where he stood. “Missed the hallway landing. Oops.”
Ilya gaped, waiting for more, but Shane didn’t move from the spot, hunched over with his arms wrapped around himself and rocking a little side to side. He looked… sort of awful, if Ilya was honest, deep purple bags under his eyes and complexion sallow.
“Shane, hey,” Ilya placated, sliding off the end of his bed and crossing the room in a few long strides. “What’s wrong?”
“I like you,” Shane blurted, in French (his default language for anxiety, it seemed), “A lot. And I’m feeling very conflicted about that because I’ve basically been paying you to put up with me. But, um, now the plan isn’t even on anymore since my mom knows the truth. So. You don’t have to see me again if you don’t want to. I’ll send you the final 10k no matter what.”
Ilya blinked slowly, absorbing the slurred French sentences and getting the gist at least. Smiling, he stepped even closer, tugging Shane forward until he could pull him into a comforting embrace. Lips at Shane’s ear, he said softly, “But what if I like you too?”
Shane leaned back in his arms, looking incredulous at the idea. “But I’m your Donor?”
Ilya shrugged, and in snappy Russian said, “It started out that way, sure. But you could just be my rich older boyfriend who spoils me instead?” He grimaced, wondering if that would be considered moving too fast. “At some point, of course. If we are compatible.”
“Oh, I think we’re compatible,” Shane teased, more of his bratty personality emerging as he calmed. He pressed a kiss to the corner of Ilya’s lips, melting when Ilya reached up to grasp at his cheek and tilt them so that their mouths connected fully. Pulling away after a delicious moment, Shane added, “But I agree. Let’s not get crazy here. A few more dates, maybe, and then we can label it. No pressure.”
Ilya laughed and pecked him on the nose. “Oh ‘let’s not get crazy’ he says, and yet he killed a man for me on our first date.”
Shane stuck his tongue out at him. “I told you I didn’t kill him, Ilya,” he stated primly, “I merely suggested that he consider not being alive anymore.”
Ilya rolled his eyes, though he felt as if his frozen heart was warming in his chest all the same. “So, about this third date? Since we don’t have to pretend?”
Shane smiled. “Anywhere you want.”
Nuzzling into Shane’s throat, Ilya murmured, “And if I also want you to stay right now? And maybe take your clothes off?”
Shane waved a hand and was suddenly, absurdly naked.
Ilya jolted backward at the sensation, folding over and laughing so hard he thought he might rupture his mummified spleen.
“Where did they go?” he asked in disbelief, even as he was stalking closer once more and reaching a hand between Shane’s legs.
“My laundry basket,” Shane said between giggles, surprising Ilya with the mundanity of his power until he added, “In another realm.”
Ilya snorted, reaching around to palm at Shane’s perfect, perky butt. “Please stop hinting at inter-dimensional travel. Or I’m going to have to dedicate my post-doc to doing math about you.”
“Sounds sexy,” Shane murmured, and blinked Ilya’s clothes away too, making him huff out another laugh, “Though the last man who did math about me discovered a dwarf planet in the asteroid belt so.”
Ilya froze, hands cupped over Shane’s pecs. “Are you… do you mean, Gauss!?”
Shane grinned. “When they weren’t at war, eighteenth century Europe was a blast. Euler was nicer though. Learned a lot of my Russian then.”
Ilya groaned, refusing to get harder thinking about Shane’s alleged liaisons with history’s most famous polymaths. He clearly hid it poorly, with the way Shane wrapped a hand around his obvious boner and murmured, “Wow, you really are a nerd. Should I tell you about the time that Heisenberg played piano for me?”
“No,” Ilya replied quickly but it came out half-moaned.
He was not going to come thinking about Shane being serenaded by one of the pioneering physicists in the theory of quantum mechanics. It would make giving his next lecture on the subject on Thursday very awkward in front of his undergraduate students.
“Lube is in my desk drawer,” he added instead, nodding his head toward the tiny writing area he’d set up near his bed.
“I know,” Shane said, terrible little creep that he was, and made the bottle appear in his hand.
In an instant (even without primordial vamp magic), Ilya had Shane face down on the bed and begging beautifully, his fingers slick inside of that desperate hole.
“Turn over,” he instructed, once Shane was nearly crying for it, breath catching in his throat at the vision of this impossibly handsome vampire, their kind’s veritable Lost Prince, breaking two hundred years of relative solitude to be splayed out in Ilya’s lumpy twin bed, gazing up at him starry-eyed.
He leaned forward to drape over Shane like a weighted blanket, bending one of those muscular legs at the knee to hook around his lower half and pressed their mouths together just as he pushed inside. They breathed out twin sighs, Ilya fully seated and just sort of grinding into Shane’s guts for a moment, before beginning a slow, gliding rhythm.
“Mm, that’s it, baby bat,” Shane murmured, head tossing to the side in pleasure, “My fledgling is learning so well.”
Ilya’s hips kicked at the terms of endearment, surprising a deeper moan out of both of them. Shane’s hands scrabbled against his back, sharp nails cutting into the flesh there. The scent of blood floated into the air between them and Ilya’s fangs distended almost painfully in response.
“Bite my neck,” Shane choked out as his raised leg fitted around Ilya like a pressure clamp, pulling him impossibly deeper.
Ilya shook his head, the action much too close to an actual mating than he could stomach. “Sire, I can’t. I won’t be able to control it.”
“You will,” Shane said confidently, leaning up to press a kiss to Ilya’s jugular before turning to bare his own neck again. He was still sighing out happily at the movement of Ilya inside of him, lids occasionally fluttering shut at the sensation, though Ilya could see in the interim that his pupils were normal-sized and the whites of his eyes were visible. Calm.
Gazing longingly at the golden expanse of Shane’s neck, Ilya felt dizzy with temptation, fangs aching worse than ever, and he leaned forward again just to sniff at the vein there.
“Imagine your teeth marks on me,” Shane prompted, squirming a little on Ilya’s stilled cock, “I’ll heal it after, don’t worry. Won’t let the Claim take. But I just… mm, want to admire the look a little.”
Ilya shuddered at the thought, picturing the distinct scarred impression of the wound on the left side of a vampire’s neck that signified they were off limits. His thoughts shifted then, to historical mathematicians, and the specter of this mysterious JJ, and every other blood baby on the Bloodbanker$ app, and felt a possessive fury begin to boil beneath his skin. He hissed, fangs sinking into Shane’s neck without another word, the connection there immediately stronger than from the wrist or the thigh.
Shane made a ragged noise low in his throat, almost a purr, and the vibrations traveled up Ilya’s fangs like an echo of the pleasure there. The blood flowed sweet and syrupy onto his tongue, his orgasm rapidly approaching with the way every sensation was blending into beautiful ecstasy.
“Do the thing,” he pleaded nonsensically, thrusts picking up as he chased his release, “Let me feel you.” And he cried out in relief when Shane nudged at the back of his brain, molding them together like he had in his cottage bedroom.
The feeling of Shane all around him was becoming so essential to his being that he feared the impending moment without it, the emptiness that left him hollow and aching when he was returned to his own mind. Maybe it would be different this time, now that they liked each other openly… now that he could ask Shane to stay. He felt Shane clench around him and heard the essence of a moan, before a curious mental poke, like an actual finger to his brain, had his Sire’s voice filtering through.
I can feel you worrying.
Ilya swallowed, thought openly: I like you in here. Too much.
An energy wrapped around him, warm and comforting, as he was saturated with the sensation of deep, devoted care all the way down to his bones.
If we were Mated, his mind ventured unprompted, would it always feel like this?
Yes, Shane showed him. And then ‘Yes’ again, aloud.
Ilya came immediately, shuddering on top of Shane with a pitiful series of cries as his fangs dislodged from their home in that sweat-slicked neck, and then felt the strange metaphysical knowledge again that Shane was teetering on the edge too. He pulled out, slithering down the bed in reverse and sucking two fingers into his mouth before slipping them into Shane’s stretched hole without preamble. Ilya flicked his gaze up to make eye contact just as Shane shot him a wondrous look, and he swallowed down that weeping cock in one practiced inhale. Pressing a hand to his stomach to hold him still, Ilya worked Shane with his mouth, humming happily as the big, muscly vamp beneath him squirmed and squirmed.
Mine. Shane’s mind said, clear as a bell, before he was coming down Ilya’s throat with an audible yelp. Ilya, bolder and greedier now, turned his head and bit into the crease of Shane’s groin, sucking harshly as those heavy thighs squeezed tightly around his head in response.
Shane all but screamed in overstimulation, the radiating warmth of his prolonged pleasure echoing across their connection again, until it ballooned too big for the channel and simply… drifted away. Ilya detached his fangs, tonguing over the wound, and glanced up to see that Shane was smiling dopily up at the ceiling, expression dreamy and distant. His eyes had gone completely black and glassy like a marble, flecks of gold where the pupil should be.
“Sire? … Shane?” he asked, crawling back up Shane’s body to hover over him, a hand pressed to one freckled cheek.
Still here, little one. Give me a moment.
Sighing out in relief, Ilya lowered back onto his stomach, squishing Shane from head to toe in a way that made him do that throaty, purring thing again. They laid there, connected for ages, until Shane let the shared consciousness slip free, greeting Ilya with a cutesy ‘hi’ in his spoken voice that made Ilya feel like he’d been staked through the heart. Silly with post-coital affection, they shared a furtive ‘huh, we just did that’ sort of smile.
“I have a guest lecture for Dr. Hayes’ thermodynamics class at four,” Ilya murmured sadly, nosing at Shane’s throat where the outline of his teeth was still visible.
Shane perked up at that, kissing at the side of his face eagerly. “Can I watch?”
Ilya cringed, knowing that smuggling an all-powerful hottie like Shane onto a campus full of curious vamps and other power-sensitive creatures would be a little difficult. “Depends. Can you be, ah, sort of low key?”
“Obviously,” Shane said and then turned completely, thoroughly invisible.
Ilya shoved at him, or at least at the theoretical space he occupied, and complained, “Okay, I want that full list of powers now.” Voice dipping lower, he added, “But we are having some fun with the invisibility thing later, you brat.”
Shane reappeared beneath him with a grin. “I’ll behave in class, I promise. I’ve only done university like, a hundred times over the years. It’s not even hard.”
Ilya cast his eyes at the ceiling, feeling grateful that Shane was not one of his know-it-all students, and leaned down to kiss him until the very last moment he needed to leave.
True to his word, Shane was largely a polite and undetectable presence in the lecture hall, and Ilya’s professor friend and thesis committee member, Wyatt Hayes — a charming Selkie who’d been a fourth year when Ilya had started the undergraduate program at U of T — seemed none the wiser to their honored guest. Ilya clicked through his slides on the intersection of thermodynamics and open quantum systems, presenting with easy confidence to the wide-eyed third years who furiously typed out their notes in response. He stuttered only once when, with a tiny tug at his brain stem, he heard Shane’s inner voice whisper, ‘This is so hot.’
‘Menace,’ he hissed back and heard the ghostly echo of Shane’s laughter as the connection closed once more.
“You seem oddly happy for a final year doctoral student,” Wyatt commented after the lecture had concluded, clasping Ilya on the shoulder with a chuckle, “Can’t say I smiled even once until my oral exam was over.”
Why is he touching you, Shane’s voice returned unprompted, sharp and possessive in nature, as another echo of 'mine, mine, mine' caged Ilya's brain like a bear trap.
Ilya gave him a mental shove to chill out, and flashed Wyatt a friendly smile, even as the professor regarded him a little oddly with his sharp, knowing eyes.
“Will we see you back in our goal in spring?” Ilya asked, “Now that your hunt for tenure is over?”
Wyatt’s expression relaxed as he said, “Yes, definitely. I’ve been missing the ice and my boys all year. Academia is a scam, Rozy, stay far, far away if you can.”
Ilya laughed at the dramatic proclamation, sensing an invisible grumbling Shane just over his shoulder, and said, “I fear it is too late for me, Hazy. Thank you for having me today, though. Good practice.”
“Yeah, yeah,” Wyatt said, waving him off, “Let me know you when you actually schedule your defense. I want to be in a prime seat to make faces at you.”
All packed up, Ilya departed the lecture hall with another laugh, unsurprised when a now-visible Shane was on him the moment he passed through the doors.
“Oh my god, you are so smart,” Shane cooed, pinching his cheeks and making Ilya blush, “That was amazing. I want to be at your defense too. Front row.” His expression darkened. “I won’t let Dr. Hayes distract you.”
Ilya leaned down to kiss him gently, murmuring, “So much jealousy, Sire. Take a fake-breath for me, hmm?”
“I faded your mark,” Shane pouted, tilting his neck to show the smooth skin there, “Made me feel… icky.”
Frozen heart thumping in his chest, Ilya threaded their fingers together and said, “I guess I will just have to give you another one, hmm? And another. Until it sticks.”
“Careful,” Shane whispered, teleporting them back to Ilya’s apartment with another blink, “or I will think you are proposing to me.” He turned up his nose, tone silly as he continued, “I’m very ancient, you know. A rushed engagement is not so unusual.”
“I can’t believe I’m in mutual like with you,” Ilya replied in long-suffering Russian syllables, “You are actually certifiable. And it’s rubbing off on me.”
“Mm, rubbing off,” Shane said, clearly ignoring all the rest as his fangs nicked at Ilya’s chin.
God, he’d taken his loner vamp daddy and turned him into a sex pest. How awful.
Going eerily still, his eyes turning inky black again, Shane sighed and said ‘duty calls’ before leaning forward to press a kiss to Ilya’s cheek and blinking out of there.
Alone now, Ilya immediately dove onto his bed, sheets still smelling of their earlier activities as he shoved his face into his pillow and, like a teenage girl with a crush, let out a long scream.
It was deceptively easy, casually dating the Prince of Vampires — a nickname which Ilya wielded gleefully no matter how many times Shane complained that his family’s existence predated a monarchical structure — while somehow balancing his intensive doctoral studies too.
Shane was an oddly excellent cheerleader, inquisitive and intelligent enough for Ilya to bounce ideas off of between revisions with his advisor (though he had to remind Shane that no, he did not want the real life Mothman to weigh in), understanding of Ilya’s limited free time as winter bled into spring, and extremely doting in general. Blood bag crates showed up on Ilya’s doorstep on the regular, along with vamp-friendly snacks from all over the world, and once, a signed Boston Bears’ Marchand jersey with a note pinned to the front that just read ‘eww :)’ which actually made Ilya shed stressed-out grad student tears in gratitude.
They went out for dates sometimes, but more often stayed in, feeding on each other and watching hockey games once the season had started, and speaking in a silly mixture of their shared languages in a way that made Ilya feel so wonderfully, fluently understood.
Shane had even signed up for Ilya’s beer league team, claiming that he played hockey at an amateur level, although he was so preternaturally fast on the ice that all the teams, Ilya’s included, agreed he was allowed in only if he wore weighted skates and shot with his weaker hand. He scored at least once a game anyhow and had been further banned from any sort of celly for being so terrible and smug about it. He was then also banned from speaking to the rookies in the locker room after their latest acquisition, a first year Physics student in Ilya’s department named Luca, had complimented Ilya’s haircut once and Shane had nearly made him cry by rolling his eyes back in his head and intoning, ‘I can see the exact moment you will die.’)
And, they fucked, of course, endlessly and insatiably, each moment just as potent as the last. Ilya had never done more laundry in his life, sheets seemingly a constant mess of sweat and blood, which he learned all too late that Shane could simply evaporate in a blink. But good lord, both Shane’s appetite and his propensity to pitch freakier and freakier role playing scenarios — with the psychic abilities to make most of them come temporarily true — was challenging Ilya’s preconceived notion that he was obviously the sexual deviant between them. Two hundred years of self-imposed celibacy in a fortress of solitude would be enough to make a whore out of anyone, he supposed.
However, it wasn’t long before the submission deadline for Ilya’s final draft began to loom, Shane spending more time talking him off the ledge than anything.
It was on one of these nights that Ilya was furiously incorporating his advisor’s final pieces of feedback, Shane’s wrist trapped between his teeth like a puppy chew toy, as the man himself perched on the corner of Ilya’s new, much larger desk in the separate living room area of his also new apartment. (A door to his bedroom? he often still considered with unmasked glee. What a miracle.)
Slurping at Shane’s blood like he was downing an energy drink for a cram study sesh, Ilya hunkered down for another endless hour, resolving the last of the track changes with a victorious cry of ‘fuck, I’m finished’ and then promptly burst into exhausted tears.
“Oh no, don’t cry, baby bat,” Shane whispered, hopping down from his perch and wrapping his arms around Ilya to float them both gently over to the living room sectional. “You’ve worked so hard, hmm? What a relief.”
“I can’t believe it’s almost over,” Ilya murmured, his bottom lip wobbling, “and I don’t know how I would have done it without your support.” He sniffled, kissing at Shane’s chin. “Thank you.”
“You would have done just as wonderfully without me,” Shane said, though he hugged Ilya closer, “In most universes, you remain a very capable human and finish your degree with ease and… and fall in love with a nice fellow human who isn’t a spooky old man at all.”
Ilya scrubbed at his tears, unsure if Shane was being literal or not. “I don’t want a nice human,” he whispered, a little pitiful with it, grad student brain turned into soup from the mounting pressure and a degree of sleep deprivation that challenged even his superior vampiric resolve.
Shane bit at his ear. “Well, in this universe, you have me for as long as you want me.”
Forever.
“I like you very much, spooky old man,” he whispered, and Shane kissed him with fangs bared, blood flowing between their teeth and tongues in a grossly symbiotic exchange.
My mate, Ilya’s veins sang with possessive joy, not for the first time, and he let the pretty thought of a ring of teeth on his neck momentarily crowd out all of his academic anxieties. Months of Shane, his Sire, longer than he’d ever thought he’d have after their temporary Donor arrangement, had made him braver, and so he took the natural leap.
“Claim me, please,” he breathed out, making Shane still beneath him, “You don’t have to bite me just yet, I know that is… a binding decision, but… I want people to know.”
“You’d wear my token?” Shane asked, leaning back to meet Ilya’s eyes, “They’ll recognize the sigil, Ilya. People will talk. I don’t… I don’t want to cause any problems for you, right before you finish your degree.”
“Please,” he repeated, staring boldly back, “I am confident in my work, just as I am confident in this thing we are building between us. I’m yours, if you’ll have me. I don’t want there to be any doubt.”
“My spoiled little fledgling,” Shane teased, though the flecks of shimmer in his eyes betrayed his faux-nonchalance, “If you’re sure, then yes, of course I will give you this.”
Wordlessly, he loosened a ring from his hand, the band obsidian black and edged in gold, and Ilya watched in awe as Shane pressed the metal between his thumb and forefinger until it was flattened and whole like a coin. His eyes flashed, black to match, and from the metallic circle a sparkling black gem in a gold and diamond setting grew. Shane spun it to show the intertwined ‘SH’ insignia engraved on the back, and clicked his fingers, the charm appearing on the empty length of gold chain Ilya always wore, nestling coolly against his throat.
Ilya swallowed, lashes blinking wetly at the feeling of weight on the necklace again; his mother’s cross had hung there for many years, but he’d been heartbroken to find that, although she had never been particularly devout, the religious symbol still burned unbearably against his Turned skin.
Before leaving the Manor for the last time, he’d tucked the charm away in her old jewelry box, fingertips scalding as if he’d pressed them to the stovetop, and cried like he was twelve years old again, finding her pale white, appearing drained of blood entirely. An overdose, his father had cruelly claimed, though there was such inherent danger in his involvement with the Council that Ilya had never been sure of the truth. A punishment, maybe, was just as likely. Either way she had been very, very sad for as long as he could remember, a pretty human in a gilded cage. He knew the feeling.
“There,” Shane spoke decisively, tugging him from his scattered memories, “The Hollander-Fujiwara Line, those of the Original Few, welcomes you.” Frowning, he added, “You’ll probably have to talk to my mom a lot more now, sorry. She’ll sense the token. It’s sort of a tracking device, in a way, for the family’s protection.”
“I will do anything in order to keep you,” Ilya told him, feeling unbearably romantic about the whole ordeal.
“Easy, baby bat,” Shane said with a laugh, “or I’ll think you’re proposing to me again.”
Clearly infected by Shane’s ancient brand of crazy, Ilya opened his mouth to agree, interrupted by the way Shane pinched his cheek and said, “Down boy. Let’s get you that PhD first, okay?”
“Okay,” Ilya agreed and padded over to his computer to send his dissertation back to his advisor for the final time.
At his throat, the token pulsed with warmth, as if somewhere along the Hollander-Fujiwara Line, someone was proud of him.
The sound of Shane’s raucous applause filled the air, making Ilya roll his eyes, though he fought a smile just the same.
“Did I sound like a total idiot?” he asked, wringing his hands, “Be honest.”
From his seat in the middle row of the otherwise empty lecture hall, Shane stood up, appearing in front of Ilya with a blink and a grin in lieu of using the steps. Show off.
Silently, Shane reached up to grasp at Ilya’s cheek with one hand and then pushed, his mind’s eye suddenly flooded with Shane’s own memories of his dissertation defense, the many places where his brain had perked up in interest at the deft way Ilya had explained a unique methodological choice or experimental result and the few tiny wrinkles of confusion on some slides that Ilya could admit were particularly dense. But underneath all that was a current of admiration and pride and oh, lo—
Shane yanked the mental thread back so hard it nearly gave Ilya whiplash.
“You are very prepared, sweetfang,” Shane assured him, pecking his nose and smoothing down the lapels of the teaching blazer he’d worn since this morning (a new undergraduate seminar on Supernatural Gravities added to his already full plate this term). “And the presentation is so close to perfect. Fix slide 18 and then I’ll allow you to rehearse it one last time. No need to over do it.”
Spinning to return to his seat, Shane chose to use the stairs back up, swaying his hips in a way he knew Ilya found hard to ignore. He was dressed in his new favorite ‘modern cosplay’ uniform of running shorts with a criminally short in-seam and an oversized t-shirt, typically from the campus store, which he seemed to consider a token of loyalty toward Ilya in his own strange way. Today he was wearing a red tee that said ‘MCGILL DAD’ on the front, which Ilya had loudly pretended to hate, until he’d accidentally shared a vision of Shane riding him in that same shirt during one of their connected sex sessions. Naturally, Shane had been an absolute pest about it since.
Ilya waited until Shane was seated, smiling down at him, and toggled back to the first slide in his presentation. Taking a deep breath, he began again:
“Good morning, Dr. Wiebe and members of the committee. My name is Ilya Rozanov, and I am a candidate for a Doctorate of Philosophy in Cryptid Sciences…”
True to his word, Shane was in the front row for Ilya’s (successful!) dissertation defense and again for his doctoral hooding ceremony too, eyes still intensely tracking all of Ilya’s friends and colleagues with suspicion.
“He’s so creepy, bro,” Cliff bemoaned, frowning when Shane flashed his black eyes at him like a blue-ringed octopus from across the reception area, signaling a venomous bite, “But weirdly, he makes total sense for you.”
(Ilya privately thought that might be the nicest thing Cliff had ever said to him.)
Dr. Hayes only barked out a seal-like laugh when Shane attempted a similar intimidation ritual later, sidling up next to Ilya and looming as he chatted with his advisor, Dr. Boodram, and a few faculty members of the Physics department. “Enough, you little demon,” Wyatt murmured in Shane’s direction, knowing his enhanced hearing would pick it up, and Ilya's too, “I know you can’t swim.”
The affronted look on Shane’s face — who in fact sank like a rock, something Ilya had learned in his attempts to siren call Shane into the waters beyond the cottage — was enough to have Ilya holding back a snort into his leukocyte champagne.
Svetlana, on the other hand, arriving late to the reception after jetting over from her own exams in Boston, took one look at the pulsing token at Ilya’s throat and punched him hard enough in the chest that it was liable to bruise (which, okay, so maybe continuing to hide the Prince of Vampires boyfriend thing from her this whole time had been a worse approach than fessing up but…). Naturally, Shane blinked in between them from across the room, hissing in clear threat, which made Svetlana hiss back, and then every vamp in the building suddenly had their phones raised hoping for an aristocratic blood bath.
“Dr. Ilya Rozanov is Claimed by the Few,” Shane intoned, eyes black and voice booming.
The entire room went silent at the proclamation.
“Cool,” Svetlana snapped back, rolling her eyes, “and I claimed him via friendship bracelet when we were four. So it looks like we’re sharing.”
Aghast, Shane launched them into a snarky battle of wits, Svetlana easily holding her own, and quite possibly (though Ilya would never admit it to his all-powerful partner) even winning.
Eventually, Ilya called for an end to the bickering, separating the two just in time for them to start arguing in Russian about Soviet-era hockey of all things, in a way that sounded just as passionate as their fight over Ilya’s virtue had been, which made him roll his eyes.
Maybe he should have been more embarrassed about disrupting the party with interpersonal drama, which was sort of a stereotype of the over-the-top vampire community, but he couldn’t help but feel extraordinarily smug about the whole thing. Ilya had rarely been treated as anything special in his life, so sue him if he thought he might deserve to preen a little.
Later, as Shane peeled off his layers of doctoral regalia (pausing to hang everything up in the provided garment bag) and coyly asked if he would leave the tasseled beefeater cap on during sex (‘no, you weirdo’), Ilya allowed the full sense of accomplishment to sink in. He’d gotten the degree and bagged the guy too, or, well, mostly at least. He wanted the promise, one day, of a proper mating, and was willing to wait a literal eternity for the privilege; he just wasn’t sure, for all their joking about proposals and marriage, if Shane saw that future for them too. Supposedly, there was a great, forever love somewhere out there for Shane, as the prophecy foretold, and Yuna’s comment from their nonconsensual meeting still nagged at him.
It did seem presumptuous to think that the universe had made Shane wait over a thousand years just for Ilya of all people to turn up.
Down to his undershirt, he slid away from Shane’s grabby hands and asked, “Will you tell me about JJ?”
From the opposite couch cushion, Shane looked like he’d been slapped.
“He was my partner and then he died,” he said after a moment, voice hollow, then scooted toward Ilya again.
Ilya put a hand up, pushing at his chest to keep the distance, speaking more firmly, “Shane.”
Shane shoved back at him, looking red-cheeked and teary-eyed now. “What does it matter, Ilya?” he argued, “I have you.”
Ilya shook his head, finding that he needed to hear the story just as much as he suspected Shane might need to tell it, to someone who didn’t carry Yuna’s preconceived judgments at least. “He mattered to you. So it matters to me. I’m just trying to understand… hundreds of years, his whole life span, and still you did not…”
“He didn’t want to be mates, okay,” Shane cut in, voice raised, eyes on the edge of pure, endless void again, “I know my mom told you this.” He huffed, scrubbing at his face. “Look, we met in the intellectual salons of Paris in the 1600s, when I was 500-something and he was in his 90s. He was descended from the vampire rulers of Ancient Nubia, tall and dark-skinned and endlessly charismatic, with one of those ‘light up the room’ personalities. He told me right away that his family all lived to 300 at best and so he wanted to learn and to travel as much as possible, to never take up roots in one place. I thought that was such a romantic idea at the time. But he also told me, as soon as I confessed, that we weren’t destined to be together.”
Frowning, Ilya gently probed, “Do you think he really knew that?”
“Yes,” Shane replied, nodding. There was a tiny sniffle and then, “It was a terrible, on and off again thing. We fought constantly. Slept with people to make each other jealous, then spent years apart stewing about it. I called it love, because it lasted for so long, and because I… didn’t know any better.” Ilya watched Shane hunch in on himself, tears flowing properly now, “JJ had already Seen that he wasn’t my future, so I guess I understood, in a way, why it never made sense to invest so much time in me. But I thought… I don’t know, that one day I might convince him of forever. Obviously not.”
Ilya found himself quickly scooting over on the sofa, throwing an arm around Shane’s shoulder, the other man tucking his head into his neck and shaking, just a little.
“I don’t understand then,” he whispered, “how anyone could not want as much time with you as possible.” He nudged at Shane, trying to tease a smile out of him. “Halfway through our first date I was thrilled, thinking how lucky I would be to see you again. Even if we only had two dates left.”
“I paid you to hang out with me,” Shane said in retort, Ilya able to feel the pout of those lips against his neck.
“You paid me to take some photos because your family was worried,” Ilya argued, privately thinking that maybe Yuna had been just a tiny bit right about Shane’s loneliness, “You never asked me to have fun or to laugh or to kiss you and fuck you after.” He swallowed, a wave of emotion so thick he felt engulfed by it. “You… you never asked me to fall in love with you, for real.”
Shane stilled against him at the words, completely frozen in that eerie way of his, before he whispered, “That’s why I said that JJ didn’t really matter. Because he was part of my life, and he made me happy sometimes, but… I know now that it wasn’t love. Not really.” He nosed into Ilya’s neck, face still wet with the handful of tears he’d shed. “Not like this.”
“I want to be Mated to you,” Ilya confessed, figuring he might as well go all in, “And I will trust you to decide when that happens for us. Decades, centuries… if we are still together, I will wait. I just want you to know that you don’t have to convince me.”
Shane leaned back to stare at him, irises colored a sweeter brown again, and proposed, “Now?”
“Crazy, spooky old man,” Ilya replied in one incredulous breath, a smile blooming on his features.
“Spoiled rotten blood baby,” Shane teased right back, reaching down to thread their fingers together.
And then, like something out of a fairytale and a horror film all at once, Dr. Ilya Rozanov locked eyes with the immortal Shane, keeper of the Hollander-Fujiwara line, and saw a future that could never be entirely his own. They were inevitable, inextricable, bound in blood from the start. Shane had been in his brain so often it was worse in there without him. And all this from a silly app on their phones.
(Once Mated, Ilya couldn’t wait to send vampqueen an anon ask with a list of blood baby tips of his own, and maybe he’d leave Bloodbanker$ a glowing four star review too, one star off for the terrible dick pics, obviously.)
“Now,” he agreed, meeting Shane’s eyes again, his mate’s eyes, and felt his frozen heart defrost in his chest at the rightness of the word.
Shane’s fangs extended, the glint of them in the lamp light of Ilya’s Montreal apartment like a beacon for what was to come. What a beautiful thought — that his undead life was only just beginning.
Ilya turned and bared his neck.