Sucks to Suck – Chapter 13

The car drove through a quiet Seattle on its way back to Logan’s apartment, and with her senses sharpened by the recent feeding, Marion found herself admiring the way the lights reflected on the raindrops on the window as they were pushed back by the car’s momentum, and she could hear the engine working below her and felt close to being able to distinguish the individual bursts of the pistons and the sound of the tires scrapping on wet asphalt. Overall, riding a car when she was so well-fed was a strange, perhaps even unsettling experience, but one she would’ve been able to enjoy to some degree if it wasn’t for the sour path the night had taken.

Marion was sitting by the car’s left window while Isabella sat between her and Logan. There was an awkward silence within the vehicle that had picked them up at the Triskelion and it extended for most of their ride downtown back to the residential neighbourhood where Logan lived. Marion was still rather upset at her roommate and, to a lesser degree, at Isabella, for how they had tossed a wet blanket in what should’ve been otherwise a great night for her. It was not a common occurrence for her for a hunt to be successful. Let alone her being able to feed on a human without further complications and entanglements and to drink without having to pay Dave half of everything she made that month. To feel her heartbeat and her body heat up without having to also deal with the toxic taste of anticoagulant clinging to her tongue. And while she did feel a certain smouldering euphoria inside her, it had been tainted by the two girls’ attitude towards her. An attitude she didn’t fully understand.

As far as they knew, all Marion had done was make out with a girl at a dark corner in the Triskelion, and yet they acted as if she had done something terrible. She had, of course, but nothing that they knew about. And besides, Logan had helped her, encouraged her even, to pursue, to reach out and try her luck. She should be sharing the euphoric feeling of success with her roommate, not feeling guilty about having it and having to conceal it. But she did feel guilty. And she couldn’t really reckon why that was either.

Marion had a theory, something she formulated for herself over the years and never had anyone to share with; that when their bodies stopped ageing as part of their curse, their brains would also stop developing. Experience ought to count for something when you lived potentially hundreds of years, of course. But Marion always felt like she often still acted her age, her apparent age, despite being closer to being a century old than being twenty-something. But it was worse than merely acting her age because she had the experience to know she should know better. She had not spent much time near the rest of her kin though, so she really had no way to know how close to the truth she was on that.

And then as she mused on her theory, the car brought itself to a halt and the app driver turned around to confirm that they were at the right place. Looking out of the window in the light pouring rain, Logan nodded.

“Yes, that’s here, thank you.”

“No, thank you… And please leave a good review, yes? Five stars.”

The girls shuffled about on their seats to disembark on the sidewalk while Marion left through the other side. The driver was seemingly in a rush, and barely waited for the doors to be closed before he was speeding away. As rain fell down on Marion’s warm skin, she pulled up the cat-eared hoodie and turned to spot Logan and Isabella already walking towards the building without waiting for her. She had still some time before daybreak, she reckoned, and she looked down across the street considering if she really wanted to go to the apartment now. As she stood there, giving the girls time to walk, she had a strange sensation like goosebumps on the back of her neck. Something she couldn’t remember feeling before, or at least not in many years. She wasn’t sure what was the cause or source of it, but it was bothersome, present.

She took a few steps to move towards the apartment building, feeling the light droplets of rain on her face and watching the water puddles forming on the irregular sidewalk. And then she inhaled deeply, even though her lungs didn’t need air, to fill her nostrils and her chest with the earthly and sweet scent of rain. She remembered sometime around the 1970s when she first learned there was a word for it; petrichor. She liked that word a lot because it sounded both dark and sweet, and a lot of things in her life were the former, but only a few were also the latter.

And as she inhaled all that scent, she got a whiff of something else in the air. Barely there, at first, but the more she thought about it, the more sure she was: blood. The scent of spilt blood. It was too faint to trigger her fangs, but not faint enough that it didn’t get her heart racing and her hunger pounding within her head.

“Are you coming, Marion?”

Isabella’s voice called from the threshold of the building door, and both of them stood under its slight overhang and looked towards her. Marion shook her head.

“I have a key… I…” Marion paused for a moment. “I’m going to stay out and grab some air. Don’t worry, I have a key.”

Logan had a slight frown, but then turned to Isabella and back to Marion and simply nodded before heading inside. Isabella stood there for a moment longer and then followed Logan within. As the door closed, Marion closed her eyes and inhaled again. She tried to search the air for the scent of blood, and it seemed gone. There one moment and then gone the next. She focused on her ears, hearing the rain hitting the asphalt, tree leaves, car roofs and grass all around her, the distinct sound the drops made on each type of surface, adding to constant white noise. But she could filter it if she focused. She could focus on each layer.

She only heard the rain, the background sounds of the distant city and the wind that blew across the street. If a squirrel was running on a branch, she would’ve heard it. But there was nothing, just stillness. Perhaps even too much stillness. Her nostrils flared as a particular smell of wet wool suddenly invaded her, and she opened her eyes to find her vision blocked by a wall of blackness.

She stumbled backwards and her head tilted up to find the pale face that looked down upon her. Black straight bangs and long hair framed a paleness that put Marion’s own to shame, the woman was taller than her by easily over a head, and she wore a long black trench coat and a tight wool turtle neck sweater underneath. A single leather strap over the sweater passed just under her breasts and to the sides and where one might expect to see holsters for guns, Marion saw the hilt of a dagger. Her heart was racing, as the unmistakable presence of one of her kin now caused goosebumps along her whole skin. How did she not hear the woman approach? Even this close? How could she not hear the light rain hitting her trench coat or her clothes flapping? And who was she?

“Good eve, London,” she spoke, in a raspy and gravelly voice, with no emotional inflexion on it. “Or would you rather be called Marion?”

Fear. Marion thought she knew fear well enough. There was a time when she lived in fear every day, and there were plenty of times when she witnessed and tasted it. But as that woman spoke her name, Marion discovered that fear had depths she had not explored. The cold dread of panic felt so much sharper when she was fully fed, as it wrapped around her spine with an icy grip, and spread through her chest like cracks in glass.

Her mouth opened to speak but it felt dry and her tongue felt lifeless and clumsy and the words, her mind could not conjure them and her mouth could not give them form. None of her muscles seemed willing to move, as if there was a way to stop time from moving forward if she was just still enough. But time kept moving, and a gloved hand reached to touch Marion’s shoulder.

“You will come with me now,” the woman informed her.

The touch was enough to break the spell of paralysis fear had cast on the smaller vampire, and she stepped back, breaking away from the woman’s hold. She frowned, only slightly as she took half a step to cover the distance.

“I won’t go anywhere with you… Whoever you are!”

“Who I am is of no importance. You will come, the choice that remains is in which state you shall be in. And whether you shall walk or be dragged. Both suit me fine.”

Her voice caused a shudder of cold panic to rush down Marion’s spine, and yet at the same time, it was beautiful. Not in the way a flower was beautiful, but in the way the black scales of a venomous cobra could be. There was a collected calm to her way of speaking, a fatalist note to her every statement that denoted a certainty beyond anything the girl in the cat hoodie had ever felt in her life. The strange tall woman taking her away was an inevitability, and all Marion could do was decide how much of an inconvenience she would be to her night. And then Marion clenched her fists and decided to be a major one.

In her current state, filled with blood and energized by a fresh successful hunt, Marion was at her strongest. And her kin’s strength largely surpassed that of a human even when she was at her worst. Like how easily she could dent the red pick-up truck and toss its owner around. For that reason, Marion had always acted mindful of her strength. But not anymore. When she threw her fist towards the woman, she threw it hard. As hard as she could, without holding back in the slightest.

And the blow landed on her stomach with more force than Marion anticipated, with the sound of the hard flesh receiving it and the ripples of the impact travelling across the slowly soaking wool sweater and causing tiny ripples of rainwater to be violently dislodged from its surface. But the woman barely recoiled, steeling her posture and not attempting to dodge. She simply held her stance and weathered the impact, wincing in pain for a second, but stoically standing still.

“I see you’ve chosen,” her gravelly voice hissed.

And then Marion felt like she was hit by a truck right to her side. Her foe’s elegant and long leg had spun with the speed of a whip and the grace of a dancer to kick her side faster than she could’ve ever hoped to react. Marion felt the ground leave her feet as the woman's shin connected with her ribs on the right and she was sent flying a short distance, until her whole left side and back impacted against a tree. The thick old trunk shook, and accumulated rainwater and leaves cascaded down and soaked Marion as she fell to her knees in the wake of the impact. Her ribs were cracked, she had no doubt about it, given the sheer pain she felt. But she also knew they wouldn’t be so in a few minutes. And so she powered through the pain to stand up and turn to face the woman who meant to capture her.

“You picked the wrong night to fuck with me, bitch.”

“And yet…” the woman said with a cruel smirk forming, with just the faintest curl in the corner of her lips, and a shrug of her shoulders.

Marion felt a primal rage welling up inside her as she watched the other woman make little of her resistance. She wouldn’t be so easily beaten and allow her to make a mockery of her attempts to defend herself. She lunged forth, ignoring the shooting pain from her broken ribs and this time watching for the tall woman’s legs as she closed in. Another kick came in but Marion managed to duck and weave out of its path, despite the speed in which it was delivered, and she used the opening of her unexpected dodging to deliver a haymaker blow towards the other woman’s side mid-rotation. She felt the impact rippling through her arm as it connected and her enemy seemed to reel from that one, needing a moment to recover herself and return to her fighting stance.

Before Marion could, however, feel any sort of joy in managing to land a blow so that her would-be captor would not escape unscathed from their fight, the woman was upon her again. A hand grabbed her neck and shoved her down, breaking her stance and slamming her back and head into the pavement. And as Marion was disoriented by the sudden impact and pain, the woman's knees landed square on her solar plexus and she felt her chest compress with her weight and the blow. The hand on her neck choked and lifted her head only to slam it back down again, and by that point, Marion let her arms fall limp next to her body, feeling the warmth of blood flowing from the back of her skull.

Vampires didn’t suffer concussions or brain damage though, and she knew, rationally, that it was just a matter of time until her body mended itself. But until it did, she simply couldn’t keep fighting. The pain was too much for her to move, and her ears were ringing from her head being mashed into the pavement.

“Yield,” the woman commanded, leaning down, her knee on Marion’s chest still and, with great flexibility, she brought her face inches away from the downed vampire’s own.

“F-fuck…” Marion cursed.

“Yield,” the pale tall phantom commanded, increasing the pressure on her chest.

From that angle, Marion could confirm that the chest strap under her trench coat wasn’t for guns, as most mortals would use it, but holding a pair of daggers, one on each side. She had been beaten without the other woman needing to withdraw her weapons. That was a humiliating and terrifying concept to swallow.

“I… Yi… I y-y…” Marion tried to speak, but her mouth couldn’t form the words.

And then the elegant warrior leaned even further down and closer, without moving her knees, so that Marion’s lips would almost touch her ears and vice-versa, and then she whispered, softly and slow:

“You yield?”

Marion opened her mouth. And then fangs clicked out and she lunged for the other woman’s neck, in a fraction of a second. It was so close, and yet, she was able to bring the hand on Marion’s neck to her face and shove it down back into the sidewalk, turning it to the side as she prevented the bite from connecting.

“Wicked girl, have you not realized yet how hopeless this is for you? You do not have what it takes to bring me down.”

With her face pushed to the side so that her cheek ground into the sidewalk, hissing between her fangs, Marion said:

“Maybe not but…”

And then there was a flash of steel and a painful scream. Marion’s hand sunk the stiletto-style dagger right into the middle of the woman’s thigh, through that soft muscle tissue and grazing bone before emerging from the other side.

“…I have a knife.”

Before she recovered from her staggering with the impact, Marion twisted the blade in place and sent another blinding jolt of pain against the woman. She couldn’t beat her perhaps, but using all her force when she was distracted from dealing with that pain, Marion was able to shove her from on top of herself and roll to the side, to get up and start running. At first, shambled, struggling to remember how to run while her head was still ringing. She resisted the urge to look back, knowing that a trained warrior like the woman she just faced would not need much to recover and give chase. Her only hope was running, fast and non-stop until she found a place to crawl under for daybreak.

But she had barely cleared the first ten meters when an arm shot ahead of her face, looping around her neck and forcing her to stop. Her legs continued to run ahead of her and soon they were in the air as her head and neck stood behind. And in that fraction of a second, she was thrown back onto the floor with enough force to crack the pavement. Marion’s head wasn’t ringing now, she outright blacked out for a few seconds. And when she opened her eyes, she found the woman staring down at her, dagger still stuck in her leg, blood flowing down her dark pants and raven hair now soaked from the hair clinging to her alabaster skin. She had emotion on her face this time. She was furious. She seemed to be taking a moment to decide whether she was to capture her quarry and take her to whatever place she wanted to take Marion, or if she’d destroy her then and there.

Marion tried to get up and found she couldn’t bend her back that way, so she rolled and tried to crawl through the wet floor and away. She wasn’t thinking at this point, just acting, and she managed to crawl for a handful of seconds before a boot stomped onto the middle of her back and forced her chest onto the ground. Her head turned to the side as she watched the woman using her injured leg to pin her down, and she slowly pulled her blade from inside it, face displaying only cold rage, with a mild tremble on the corner of her lips as the dagger was removed. She never broke eye contact, wiping her own blood on her trench coat and sheathing the weapon back on the holster.

“Your persistence earns you nothing… You fought, and you were beaten. Now it’s time to go.”

And Marion knew she was done for. She had fought as hard as she could, for whatever that was worth, but she had no more fight left in her. And then a sudden rush of morbid humour caused her to chuckle, as she thought about her fangs tearing into that girl’s neck in the club, and how she didn’t know that would likely be her last meal. She had no idea why one of her kin wanted to apprehend her, but she called her London, which meant she worked for or with the two suits who briefly abducted her in that van. And if she worked with them, well, they made it clear she would only get one warning. This was likely the end, Marion reckoned, as she felt the leg leave her back and her collar being lifted.

“This will hurt,” she was warned before something clipped onto her wrists.

Marion cried out in pain as her skin burned at the contact with silver, the sizzling sound and smell of charred flesh mixing with the petrichor of the night and rending off any positive qualities she associated with it. The pain of silver made everything else that happened that night seem like a caress. She couldn’t fight those restraints, and even her captor seemed to look uncomfortable handling silver, even though she was doing so through thick gloves and not in direct contact with the metal which was anathema to their kin.

Despite her pride, and her will, Marion found herself crying desperately for relief and release as the metal burned her flesh.

“Take them out… Take them out, please… Please!”

But instead, she was just lifted by her hoodie and made to stand and to march forward, towards the direction they came, towards Logan’s apartment, but then past it. The searing pain was blinding, so Marion barely realized they were approaching a large black SUV with very dark tinted windows. The tall warrior shoved Marion inside the backseat and just as she turned, she noticed how the woman was limping still from the dagger blow, and with the pain of silver informing her every thought, Marion felt a deep sense of satisfaction at the notion that she had inflicted serious pain on her enemy, even if she was ultimately defeated.

'A major inconvenience to her night,’ Marion thought, ‘mission accomplished.’ And then the door to the SUV was slammed closed. Marion sat there, feeling the pain on her wrists become duller, as whatever flesh was there to be seared had been so already, and she looked into the rear-view mirror to see tears rolling down her face and streaking her makeup. And that was when a hand moved to adjust the mirror, and Marion saw a pair of bright eyes looking at her from behind a tortoiseshell frame. She was pale and she had dark circles under her eyes, and everything about her seemed to say, ‘a bit under the weather’. But Marion knew that was no flu, there was no sweat. No, her body was ravaged by a different condition; a lack of vitality drained from her through her blood. She had been fed on.

“Hey, are you okay?”

The woman in the driver's seat was a mortal. Marion could smell that well. But she had just a little bit of vampire blood in her veins. Just a drop, but enough to mark her as belonging to someone else. Marion looked at the figure limping as she moved around the car and opened the passenger door.

“Oh my god, Skye! You’re bleeding!”

“That will pass and heal,” the tall woman replied with a shrug and a wince. “But… I might need to hunt before we go…”

Skye. Marion took note of the name. She didn’t know if that would be of any use to her, probably not, but at least now she knew the name of the woman who had beat her. The human on the other seat crawled over the gearbox to be almost on her fours in the car and eagerly stuck her wrist out.

“You shouldn’t go hunting… D-drink from me, please, mistress…”

The yearning in her voice as she offered herself to be drained despite her already ill state was a surprise to Marion, though not too shocking. A few mortals could be really intoxicated by the Kiss, she knew on some level, but she had never witnessed or made use of it.

“No,” Skye responded dryly, “your body cannot give me further sustenance until you recover. I shall find prey and…” She stopped talking to wince and place a hand on her leg before she continued as if she had never stopped. “Return shortly. Worry not about her. Silver cuffs. She’s well restrained.”

Marion tried to fight her restraints but doing so meant the silver dug into her flesh and burned even deeper. Her bruises, cracked bones and the bleeding on the back of her skull were all slowly healing. She could feel the pain subside over time. But it would take still perhaps half an hour or an hour until she was fully herself. The burning from the silver though, that wouldn’t heal for days. She whimpered pathetically and gave up squirming, and like that was her cue, Skye stopped leaning into the car and closed the door. Through the tinted windows, Marion watched her walk away, but as she moved a couple of meters from the car she just… Vanished. As if she had slipped behind a curtain, except she did so in plain sight, into thin air. And Marion couldn’t hear any limping footsteps. That was how she had closed in on her so quickly.

“You look in pain,” the girl at the front said, turning from her crawl towards the passenger seat to now face Marion between the two seats.

“I am in pain…” Marion hissed, in agony and rage.

“I’m sorry this happened to you. I don’t know what you did but if Skye needs to apprehend you, it was probably something bad, right?”

“I… I didn’t do shit.”

Despite Marion’s indignant roar of innocence, that didn’t affect the woman’s face which still contemplated her with a bit of distant detachment. And then her eyes lit up in sudden realization:

“Oh, I know!” the woman said in a startled and excited jump, “you killed the guy in the hospital!”

“What? I never killed anyone…”

“Oh, come on now… You are like…” The woman placed her two index fingers in front of her upper lip to indicate fangs.

Marion still had her own brandished so she snarled and hissed at the woman, expecting her to hop back in fear, but instead, she looked more fascinated than anything by the sight. And then she nodded.

“Exactly. I’m sure you killed people before. Lots of them. How old are you? Three hundred? Four hundred years?”

“What? N-no! Not even close.”

“Huh… Really? Then older or younger?”

Marion was so deeply in shock and disbelief that it almost dulled the pain of the silver burning her wrists. Almost. She leaned back into the car seat and looked out to the streets. It was starting to feel disrespectful that Skye was going to go hunting after cuffing her in silver and leaving her guarded by just a human. But if she was going to be sloppy with her quarry, Marion was happily taking advantage of that. She locked eyes with the woman between the seats.

“What’s your name?” she asked between hisses and grunts of pain.

“Oh, I’m Felicia.”

“Felicia… Would you do me a favour?”

“Depends… What is it?”

And then Marion focused her power on the woman and narrowed her eyes for a moment. When she spoke next her voice was firm and commanding:

“Release me.”

And then Felicia froze for a moment, and nodded, moving forward to crawl in the space between the seats as Marion turned around to offer her hands towards her. She wasn’t sure if there was a way to release the silver cuffs without a key, but she reckoned Felicia was still her best shot. Perhaps she even had a key?

Her hands pulled on Marion's wrists for a moment and yanked her arms into an uncomfortable angle, but as she looked into the lock, suddenly she stiffened and then recoiled away from her like she had been zapped by something. However, by the look of horror at her own hands, she hadn’t been zapped, she had just snapped back to her senses.

“What… What am I doing!”

“Freeing me!”

“No, no… Mistress Skye will be furious. I can’t. I can’t.”

Okay, it seemed like the blood bond between Felicia and Skye was somehow fighting her own ability to glamour Felicia. It still worked, but she shook it off remarkably quickly. Marion didn’t want to kill the woman, but she reckoned that perhaps if she could drain her into passing out, she might have time to look for a key in the car’s glove compartment. Without hands to pin her down, she’d need to lunge for the neck, and she was still aching and moving awkwardly from the pain of having many broken bones, so she knew she would not get a chance to bite again if she failed to sink teeth properly on the first lunge. As she tried to calculate the best approach at such an awkward angle, there was a tap on the car's window on the driver’s side.

Marion's chest felt heavy. Skye was back from her hunt already? No, she wouldn’t tap the glass of the car, right? She squinted, barely able to see the silhouette through the perhaps too deeply tinted windows.

“What?” Felicia shifted back to the driver's seat and turned the car on by pressing a button before she pushed down the window.

And that was when Marion saw Isabella’s face emerge as the glass lowered, with a pretty calm smile on her expression. Felicia seemed both surprised and confused by the girl knocking on the car window.

“I’m sorry, do you need something?”

“Yeah,” Isabella said, “you are parked in a residents-only area. You might get towed if you don’t move.”

“Oh… I didn’t know, thank you,” Felicia said with ease, “I’m just waiting for my friend to fetch something and then we will drive away.”

Marion's eyes met Isabella's as she gave her a raise of eyebrows in disbelief and urgency. How could she not see that she was tied there? But Isabella turned her head towards Marion and smiled with the same calm she had shown so far. She had seen her then? So, why was she not freaking out about someone cuffed in the back of a civilian car?

“Okay then, have a good night,” Isabella said and she got up from her lean to move away.

Marion's jaw dropped and Felicia turned to her with a broad smile, as she said:

“Oh, people around here are so nice…”

And then Isabella turned on her heels again, before Felicia could close the window.

“Oh, just one more thing…” she called.

“Yeah?”

And as Felicia turned her head, Isabella had her hand open with fingers splayed inches away from the mortal thrall's face. And like she was pulling invisible cobwebs floating right in front of Felicia’s eyes, or pulling a veil, she brought her fingers together in a grabbing gesture and pulled her hand away. And when she did that, Felicia's eyes immediately shut. And then her head hung and she fell onto the driver's seat. A quiet snore cut the air as she seemed to have immediately fallen into a deep sleep. Marion blinked in astonished confusion as Isabella moved to the side of the car and tried the handle. Finding it locked, she cursed in Spanish and went for her purse. Marion approached the window and watched as Isabella pulled a piece of chalk from it and began to draw on the car door. She couldn’t see what it was but as soon as she was done, she tapped it very gently with a finger and it just… Slid open, without a clicking sound, no thump of unlocking. As if it had always just been so.

“Come on, hurry…” Isabella rushed as the cold air flowed through the open door.

“What was…” Marion began as she scooted across the seat and towards freedom.

Isabella pulled her by the hoodie, yanking her to her feet and started to move towards Logan’s apartment. Marion winced in pain as the movement caused the cuffs to dislodge and touch fresh skin, which was promptly burned. She cried out in pain and stumbled, unable to continue walking.

“What? Marion, what is it?” Isabella asked, turning back, and spotting the wisps of smoke from the girl’s wrists, she winced as well.

“I… I… Uh…”

Marion had no way to explain that silver burned her skin to Isabella, though she was pretty sure she had just witnessed the girl doing something which defied any explanation she could offer. Isabella walked around her, touching her elbow to keep her arm straight and cursing again in her family's tongue as she stepped back and pulled a small notepad from her purse. It had one of those gel-filled covers and a key chain of a black cat hanging from the loops that held the detachable pages together. She flicked through a few pages, filled with weird diagrams and sigils that Marion couldn’t really place as anything she ever knew or saw, and then, finding one in particular, she tore the page out, touching it and causing an orange glow to spread through the drawings on the page. The page burned, but it left Isabella’s finger glowing like red-hot iron, and she looked apologetically to Marion before pushing it against the cuffs.

The pain of fire was almost as bad as the pain of silver, but it didn’t last long. Isabella’s finger somehow heated the silver to the point where it was soft enough for her to pull it like clay, and she broke open both cuffs before she let them fall onto the pavement. She blew on her fingers, which dispelled the red-hot magic and caused it to smoke. Waving her hand quickly in the air to disperse it, she passed it under Marion’s shoulder.

“Isabella… You’re… You…”

“Girl, we really do not have time for this,” Isabella said, leading her towards the apartment.

“How did you find me…?”

“I watched someone beat your ass from Logan’s window… Sorry I couldn’t help with that, by the way. I… Well, none of what I can do would’ve helped.”

“You did help…” Marion winced as she wobbled at a brisk pace towards the door. “Probably saved my life.”

“Probably…”

“Fuck… I don’t know what’s happening anymore…”

“Yeah, well, you’ll get used to that, in my experience…” Isabella offered as they reached the threshold of the building.

Marion simply nodded, and once they were inside, Isabella seemed a little more at ease, though she kept guiding Marion to the stairs, to ensure they would at least not be in sight of the streets. As they reached the second flight, she finally stopped to catch her breath.

“I… I really don’t follow. You are…”

“A bruja? Yes. Witch… Whatever,” Isabella said. “It’s… Complicated stuff.”

Marion's first instinct was to challenge that claim, despite what she had witnessed, and the fact she was a bloodsucking nocturnal predator that didn’t age. But she held that back and simply closed her eyes to take a deep and mostly unnecessary breath.

“Well… I have a lot of questions but… I don’t suppose Logan knows?”

“No.” Isabella nodded. “And I rather keep things like that.”

“Right, okay… Maybe we… Should go upstairs back to the apartment? The woman that caught me won’t…”

“Well… Before we do it you might want to… You know.” Isabella pointed at her own mouth.

Marion's confusion lasted only a second before she felt her fangs with her tongue and realized that that whole time she had them out. Her body was starting to mend, except for the silver burns, but the pain still made her absent-minded. She retrieved them and looked at Isabella meaningfully.

“Yes, yes, we both know shit about each other now,” she said dismissively, “I won’t tell if you don’t.”

And Marion gave a dip of agreement with her head. She had so much to say and ask, she ended up not saying anything, and merely walking upstairs with Isabella as she retrieved her fangs back into her mouth.

‘What a strange evening,’ she thought, in what she would acknowledge being perhaps the understatement of her life.