Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

O, tous mes parents veulent pas

O, qui c'est je vas faire avec toi

O, j'suis pas proche près partir

O, c'est mon tout seul, moi, tout seul

Je sais pas quand jamais que je vas revenir

O, toi, tu me fais de la misère

Je vas pas venir te voir

 

( Oh, my family doesn’t want me

Oh, what will I do with you?

Oh, I’m not close to leaving

Oh, it’s me alone, me, all alone

I don’t know if I’m ever gonna come back

Oh, you cause me so much misery

I won’t come to see you )

Les Blues de Voyage, Amede Ardoin

Prologue

A fine warm night in a small town in Lafayette Parish, Louisiana. Summer’s past the courtship phase, and promises a sweltering consummation in the coming months, but for tonight, the air is mild enough. On this pleasant night, a man is breaking into a cemetery. This particular man is, unusually enough, well-practiced at breaking into cemeteries, just as he’s well-practiced at digging up graves. Luckily too, as gravedigging is hard work even with experience. In a break from his usual habit, however, this time, he’s not here for an exhumation. He grabs a shovel. 

It takes hours, digging alone. This is a job for at least two people, but the man hadn’t wanted to ask his usual partner for help. This endeavor would also probably be easier, not to mention less risky, if it weren’t a cemetery. Almost anywhere else, in fact, would be easier. It’s just that’s not the point. It wouldn’t be right, the man feels, if the body weren’t buried on hallowed ground. After everything, it’s the least he can do. 

Eventually, he’s dug a respectable six feet down into the earth. He’s a little suspicious of the damp Louisiana soil, but the town’s just far enough north to bury their dead, rather than constructing an above ground crypt. He definitely doesn’t have the means to do that. 

The man climbs out of the hole he’s dug and sits back heavily, leaning against the wheelbarrow he’d pulled the shovel out of. He wipes his brow, pauses for a moment, then throws back the tarp concealing the rest of the wheelbarrow’s bulky contents. This is, inevitably, a body wrapped in a bedsheet shroud. He appraises it, weighing efficiency of movement versus the question of dignity owed to the dead. In the end, he favors the latter, such as is possible, and struggles as he pulls the dead weight of the body out of the wheelbarrow beside the grave, rather than simply tipping it over the side. This accomplished, he pulls a small black book out of a jacket pocket, its cloth cover crumbling; the scent, acid-sour, of moldering glue and rusty staples is sharp even over the smell of turned earth. The man contemplates it for a moment before he shrugs, and slips the book inside a fold in the shroud with more tenderness than an observer might assume him capable of. Somewhat awkwardly, he grabs the body and maneuvers it none too gently into the open grave, wincing as it falls. 

“Rest in peace, you undead bastard,” the man says, and if he sounds angry, it’s because his throat is tight, and this particular man is only comfortable expressing grief through rage. He stands there, staring down into the hole, and doesn’t count the minutes.

“Ah, fuck it,” he mutters after a while, and picks up his shovel to begin the long work of filling in the grave. 

Act One

New Orleans, Louisiana, 1933

It was ‘31 when Benny started trawling the docks again, for the first time since he’d grown too broad for the chickenhawks. It took a long time for the ‘Crash to fully hit Louisiana, at least outside of the cities, but hit it did, eventually. If it was still just him, or maybe even just him and Marie, maybe he wouldn’t’ve tried this, but they have Dot now, and neither of them can stand to watch her go hungry. There’s no work , anywhere, not even cutting sugarcane or cleaning shithouses, ‘cause everywhere there is still work, there’s already a hundred other men lined up. Frankly, he’s amazed there’s anyone left who can afford the trade at this rate, but then, he supposes wealthy men even now can still have most anything they really want. 

He left Marie in Carencro to care for Dot after the lumber jobs dried up, almost two years ago now. He’d gone farther south, to New Orleans, in the hopes of finding better work in a city, but prospects are even worse here. Now all that’s left is tricking, and his competition’s waifish women and younger, prettier boys. He can’t blame them. Everyone’s still got to eat. He thinks Marie might suspect, but what’s she to do about it? She’s hours away with an eight year old to care for; she can no more question the money he sends than he can find a different way to earn it. He repeats this to himself every time he sends a letter home with a roll of crumpled bills and vague, evasive excuses as to where it comes from.

When he was younger, the rough trade was novel, and also paid a bit better, what with both the boom after the War, and also if he’s being honest, his being a fairer sight then too, thin like all the other underfed boys but stronger than most of them, and not yet twenty. The Influenza’d taken both his parents, and Benny supposes he was lucky it waited until he was nineteen and had already a few years’ experience exploring the docks recreationally before it left him and his sisters orphans. 

It’s a hot evening in high summer, and the afternoon rains have done nothing to cool the air. The sun’s minutes from setting, not that that’s evident with the thunderclouds still hanging low and heavy in the sky. Sheet lightning flares occasionally as muggy breezes roll the stench of the harbor inward. He can hear music playing on a radio, too faint and far to make out clearly. Street lamps flicker on as the day laborers, fewer these days, punch out, grab their caps and lunch pails, trudge wearily home. The night people emerge. 

There aren’t many out tonight. A piss-drunk sailor ignores Benny in favor of a woman smoking under one of the lamps, rouged enough to hide the dark circles under her eyes and dressed younger than she probably is. It’s a boring night, and his hopes aren’t high for prospects, so when the car pulls up into the square, it immediately grabs his attention. 

He stares. How could he not? It’s a plum-colored Cadillac convertible. It’s got white walls. It’s the most expensive-looking automobile Benny’s ever seen. The beautiful car slows as it circles the street, and to his amazement, stops directly across from him. A backseat window rolls down. He can’t see the driver, but the occupant of the backseat is a young man, slender, sheet-white, and startlingly beautiful. He is a young man too, at most twenty-five by Benny’s estimate and probably even younger; hardly more than a boy. Something about him seems strange, though in no definable way. Benny’s skin prickles, and his heart beats faster, like there’s some danger he can’t see but still senses. 

He steadies himself. “See anything you like, cher?” he calls. He lets his voice be low, more gravelly than is natural, and adopts an air of menace. Boys like this one want a man they think is dangerous, in his experience. 

“Very much so,” is the soft reply. “Would you come closer, please? I can’t much see you from there.”

Benny smiles in satisfaction having netted a rich one, and pushes off the wall. He saunters up to the automobile and leans on the door, trying to surreptitiously peer in at the occupants. Despite the weight of the amber, syrupy heat, the boy’s in a full dark suit, tie neatly knotted in place and held with a pearl pin.

“And what’s your name, handsome creature?” the boy asks. 

“Name’s Benny. And you?”

The boy laughs. “Oh, that’s entirely unimportant,” he says. Fair enough. Perhaps a politician’s son then, or the scion of someone else who wouldn’t care to be so associated. 

“Not from around here, I take it,” he says. It’s not a question. The boy laughs, a musical sound. 

“Is it so very obvious?” he asks, though that’s not a question either. “We’re not going to be in town for especially long,” he adds. “My family is looking into some opportunities for shipping acquisitions.” The boy smiles to himself as he says it, pleased with himself probably. Benny doesn’t care. ‘Shipping acquisitions’ implies a degree of prosperity that has nothing to do with him. But he mentally adjusts his price to two dollars. 

He doesn’t have the furtive, guilty look of most of the men who frequent the docks. Older, sadder, miserable men with frigid wives at home, or the younger men with that future to look forward to, but who for now are thrilled and terrified at their own daring. No, this kid’s got all the confidence of a wealthy northerner who’s never once feared the consequences of coming on to the wrong man. 

“Perhaps you’d like to join me for a drink?” the boy asks coyly. Benny privately wishes he wouldn’t bother with the flirtation. It’s not as if he’s going to say no. The boy places a hand on Benny’s arm, surprisingly cool for the weather. “I have a yacht berthed on the other side of the marina not far from here,” he continues. 

A yacht! What kind of robber baron child is this, flaunting such wealth? Some of his incredulity must show on his face despite his attempts to look unfazed, because the boy smirks. “You’ll find the accommodations more than comfortable, if you’d come with me.” That last is said with a not particularly subtle note of innuendo. 

“There’s plenty I can do for you right here,” he says, trying to pivot back to the matter at hand. This isn’t a date. He’s not looking to be impressed. 

“Oh, I’m sure there is. It’s just that I’d appreciate your company for a while longer than you might be thinking. In fact, I’d like to have you the whole night. You’d be well-compensated.”

“And what’s that look like to you, sweetheart?” he says. 

“I’ll give you fifty dollars for your evening, how does that sound?” 

That brings him up short. That sounds, well. That sounds like more than a month’s worth of nights on the docks. Were he being sensible, he might hesitate to leave in the young man’s car. This isn’t the safest game they’re playing, and the richer the john, the easier it is to stiff on payment and get away with it, or for that matter, hide an inconvenient body, for the overenthusiastic or esoterically inclined. But only an idiot would turn down fifty dollars for one night’s work. Or so he tells himself.

“Alright,” he says at last, to the boy’s evident delight. Still trepidatious, he slides into the car beside his new benefactor, and they pull away from the street corner. 

Inside the car, just as plush as the outside implies, the boy snuggles up to him, still so cool in the summer heat. “I think we’re going to enjoy each other’s company,” he says, and Benny smiles. He’ll certainly enjoy the cash.

It isn’t much of a drive away from the navy’s docks and out to the marina where the private craft berth. They keep going once they reach it though, farther and farther out as the boats get ever larger until, at the very end of the dock, the car pulls up right before the street ends, in front of the last vessel in the harbor. Yacht hardly does the boy’s boat justice. It’s perhaps the most gorgeous boat Benny could ever have imagined, and far, far bigger than he knew private craft could even be. The boat seems too big to be real, to be allowed . He tries to calculate how much it would’ve cost and comes up blank. 

The driver, a weatherbeaten man in his late forties, steps out first to open the door for him. No one’s ever opened a door for him before. 

“Thank you Isaak,” the young man says. His man nods and, at the dismissal, steps back into the car and leaves, presumably to park it. 

“She’s called Paradiso .” The boy says the word with pride and relish dripping from his tongue. “What do you think of my greatest treasure, Benny?”

“It’s a magnificent boat,” he says, compelled to honesty by the sheer size of the vessel looming above them. 

“She is more than a boat, my dear,” the boy corrects, with no small note of reproach. “She’s a sanctuary.”

“Whatever you say, cher,” he says, humoring him.

“That’s right,” the boy says, and sounds amused. “Whatever I say. Come now,” he adds, and beckons Benny up the ramp and onto the boat. He doesn’t have much time to appreciate the large, comfortable-looking deck before the boy takes him by the hand and ushers him in through a handsome set of double doors. He looks all around, openly awed at all the luxury surrounding him. They pass a library as they make their way toward the back, and Benny stares covetously at the books for a moment. 

“My crew are very discreet. They won’t bother us,” the boy says when they pass a pretty young man in his shirtsleeves. The comment is almost aimed more at the crewman than Benny, though he doesn’t seem to realize it. 

“Fa — I mean, Sir, do you have a — ” the attractive crewman says, before his boss cuts him off sharply. 

“Not now Quentin,” the boy says, and waves a dismissive hand. There’s a cold rigidity to the fine line of his jaw, and Quentin ducks his head and shuffles away, muttering ‘sorry’ under his breath and shooting glances behind him. 

“I apologize,” the boy says, not a little annoyed. “He doesn’t have the sense to know when he’s not wanted.”

He pulls Benny further into the depths of the ship, through neat, narrow corridors lined with closed doors, until Benny is thoroughly lost. He hasn’t a hope of finding his way back topside without the boy’s help. At last they arrive at the end of a final corridor in front of a final door, which the boy unlocks with a key from a chain around his neck, and beckons Benny inside. It’s a large, beautifully appointed bedroom, naturally. The whole room is paneled in dark wood, with brass fixtures, giving the place an air of gloomy darkness. 

“How do you like the accommodations, Benjamin?” he asks, with full certainty of the answer.

Benny laughs. “Please, just Benny’s fine. No one’s called me Benjamin since I was much younger than you. But yeah, I like this just fine.”

“Alright, I suppose. The formal name does suit you, though. And,” he adds, still with that same unknowable amusement, “I’m rather older than I look.”

The boy’s confident, Benny’ll give him that, moves with an uncanny grace backward further into the room, toward the large four poster bed, still with Benny’s hand in his own, much smaller, cooler one. 

“Please,” he murmurs, “Sit.” He phrases it like a request and speaks it like a command, and if it rankles, being commanded by a man hardly more than a child, well, it’s not surprising, and the boy’s paying well. He’s no problem doing as he’s told. He sinks slowly down onto the starched white sheets and is self-conscious of the grime on his boots, the dust on his coat. He loosens his laces as the boy crowds in close to him, moves between Benny’s knees and holds Benny’s face possessively between those long, cold hands. He’s surprisingly strong, effete little thing that he is. 

He grasps at the lapels of Benny’s coat, and Benny obligingly shrugs out of it, drops it on the floor with an insolent quirk of his lips, and as he expected, the boy reads the ghost of defiance in the gesture, purrs with delighted arousal. He straddles Benny’s hips, eyes heavy-lidded, and Benny wraps arms around the boy that he’s still not sure won’t crush him, pulls him nose-to-nose as the boy slips a hand behind his neck. He tangles long fingers in Benny’s hair as his other hand goes down the front of Benny’s shirt and up again underneath it.

The boy has calluses on his fair palms. Benny wouldn’t have thought it of him. The boy notices him stroking softly over one rough hand, because he takes Benny’s own and presses the knuckles to his lips. 

“Not so soft as all that; are you surprised?” he asks. “Harpsichord, and sailing. Not soft-handed hobbies — though, perhaps I should call them vocations. You’re a Catholic, I’ll wager. You should know what that means.”

The boy presses his teeth so-very gently to the supersensitive skin of his throat, and Benny leans into the touch, especially as he begins palming Benny through his trousers. 

“I see we’re skipping the pleasantries,” Benny rasps, as the boy suddenly tugs sharply on his hair, forcing his head back and swallowing his words in a kiss. He’s rough with it, and still unexpectedly strong, tongue parting Benny’s lips to taste him. 

“Oh I do like you,” the boy whispers as he pulls away, leaving Benny gasping. “Maybe I’ll keep you, and have you all to myself forever, my dear, lovely Benny!” The boy punctuates all his words with kisses, covering Benny’s mouth and cheeks and neck, rolls his hips cleverly and oh if that doesn’t do it for him, he’ll be damned. The boy’s mouthing at his neck, sucking and worrying a bright, sparking little mark above his pulse point, rocking into Benny all the time. He hums in pleasure he wasn’t at all expecting from a rough trade fuck, and he’s not paying attention to all the things the boy’s saying, assumes it’s all just upperclass filth for the boy’s own benefit, and it might not have saved him, paying attention, but letting the boy get to him, pleasure him in return, most certainly damned him. 

He allows himself to be pushed flat on his back, kicks off his boots, as the boy finishes pulling him out of his shirtsleeves, and starts in on removing his own. He seems to take a perverse amount of joy in discarding his own fine coat and waist-coat with equal carelessness as Benny tossing aside his old worn things, though he does carefully remove the pearl pin from his tie and lean over to place it safely on the dresser. 

He moves back off the bed long enough to stand and remove his trousers and underthings, and he stands before Benny fully nude, still carrying himself regally. 

He's taking the lead, and for half a second Benny almost thinks the boy might want to fuck him, but instead, he holds Benny down with one careless hand, and climbs forward until he’s positioned to sit on Benny’s face. Obligingly, Benny tongues his hole, working him open and wet. He rubs light circles into one of the boy’s legs with one hand, while, with the other, he works himself free of his own trousers and begins to stroke himself. It’s been a long time since the last anyone fucked him, instead of the other way ‘round. Boys like this are usually looking for a father figure, in his experience, and the rough men on the docks are usually looking for a fight. Ten years at least since he was slight enough to be taken for a punk. He’s not sure if he misses the feeling or not. 

The boy’s eyes practically roll back in his head as Benny moves his tongue in tight, quick circles around his hole. A second later, he twitches, overstimulated, and moves back. He’s dripping, and he reaches behind him on his nightstand for a little bottle of oil. He pours it on his own fingers and Benny gets a private show as he pushes into himself and scissors his fingers. Benny’s already aching for it, rolling his hood down and up over his leaking cockhead. He gropes around for the lube, coats his cock in preparation. 

“You ready?” he gasps, and the boy nods briefly, still fucking himself on his fingers. He moves further down, above Benny’s hips, lines himself up and lowers himself down in one long, smooth push that leaves them both groaning. He’s tight, and hot, and oh fuck , when he starts moving, fucking himself on Benny’s cock, he sees stars. The boy leans forward, and his slender callused hands find Benny’s throat. 

He really is stronger than he looks, because the grip on Benny’s neck, choking off his air, is alarmingly complete. Pressure’s building in his head, and he urgently shakes the boy’s shoulders, trying to get his attention. The boy smiles with all his teeth, and loosens his grip, though he doesn’t wholly let go. Benny gulps in air, his heart pounding, for just a moment before the grip tightens again. One of those kinds, then, he thinks. He’s not fond of the choking, but for fifty dollars the kid can do as he pleases, and anyway he doesn’t seem like he’s trying to do actual damage. 

It’s making him light-headed, and between that and the way the boy feels, the way he moves so expertly, Benny’s getting close. He tries not to be too loud, but the boy’s pulling soft noises out of him, gasps and moans when he can breathe, little cut-off keening sounds when he can’t. Pressure’s building in his other head now, his hands are closing useless twisted in the fine sheets, he wants he wants he wants —

“Not yet,” the boy breathes, “not before me.”

Benny is trying to comply with that order, truly, but it’s no easy thing, with the way the pace increases, with the way he’s squeezing himself tight around Benny’s cock, the way he’s let go of Benny’s neck to lean forward and suck bruising, far more pleasurable marks onto him instead. Instead, Benny tries to preempt him, takes the boy in hand and rubs his thumb along the head of his prick, which makes him almost purr, deep in the back of his throat. 

“That’s it, cher,” he says, more breath than sound, “c’mon darlin’,” and that must really do it for him, because the boy actually laughs aloud as he spills himself across Benny’s chest. It’s only a moment later that Benny comes himself, inside him, shuddering his completion and biting back any too dramatic noises of his own. The boy pulls out and falls on top of him in a heap of sweaty limbs, heedless of the mess, smug grin firmly plastered on his face just as his dark blond hair is plastered to his head. 

“Well, that was certainly enjoyable,” he says into Benny’s collarbone, where he’s buried his face and is pressing deep kisses. 

Benny huffs a laugh. “I’ll say. Though,” he adds quickly, “if you’re serious about going the whole night, you’ll have to give me a minute or so to catch my breath, kid.”

“Hmm, I think I can manage that,” he says dreamily. He rolls over and reaches across Benny to the nightstand, and retrieves a handkerchief that he uses to mop up as much of his spunk as he can. When he’s done, and tossed the rag carelessly somewhere in the room, he lays back across Benny’s chest, and the two of them doze for a stretch. It’s pretty fucking nice, all things considered. 

After a while of content silence, he asks, out of nowhere, “Do you have a wife, Benny?”

Benny raises an eyebrow. “What’s it to you?” he says mildly. The boy shrugs. “Just curious.”

“Yeah, cher,” he says, “I have a wife. Lots of men on the docks do. Does that surprise you?”

“Hmm, I suppose it shouldn’t,” he muses. “Why though? Clearly you’re not doing this solely for the money.”

“You’d be surprised what a man’ll do for money,” he deflects, looking away.

“Oh, not at all. Men do all sorts of things for money. But that’s not why you do it, isn’t it? Not entirely. So why bother with a wife?”

The question is pointed, and dances along the edge of something entirely too close to truth for Benny’s comfort. “I dunno,” he mumbles, still avoiding the boy’s piercing gaze, “why does anyone get married? It’s just what you do.”

“It’s not what I’d do,” the boy insists, and Benny does look over at him then, gives him a look of exaggerated patience. 

“You know, I think you’ll find that’s not the only difference between us, darlin’,” he says dryly. 

“Mmm, I suppose you’re right. Still, what a tragic way to live.”

He wants to argue with that, but the words get stuck in his throat. It’s not tragic, he wants to say, not all of it. Not Dot, at least . But he can’t find a way to say it that doesn’t sound like denial. The boy takes his silence as the end of the conversation, and returns to his project of marking up Benny’s neck. He’s sucking and biting hard enough that it’s not pleasurable anymore, and Benny pulls back, trying to pull away, when he feels a sudden sharp pain in his neck. Something hot and wet drips down to pool unseen at his collarbone. 

“I’m...bleeding?” he says, unsure, alarmed. “Did you cut me?” The boy lifts his face to look at him, flushed with arousal, and his lips are red, very red. His teeth are red too. They’re...wrong, there’s too many of them, sharp like a gar’s and stained at the gumline, glossed slick with blood. Benny’s arms and legs are all of a sudden heavy, too much so to move. His head’s spinning. 

The boy takes his own wrist into his mouth then, bites down hard and sucks for a moment, then tilts Benny’s chin up to kiss him with bright lips; Benny complies, delirious. When he does, hot liquid pours into his mouth. Without thinking, he swallows down whatever’s been given to him, and the boy looks at him and giggles, red smeared on kiss-bruised lips. He puts his hot mouth to Benny’s ear, whispers, “Accípite, et bíbite ex eo omnes, hic est enim Calix Sánguinis mei, novi et ætérni Testaménti, mystérium fídei.” He laughs again at that. 

“Yes,” Benny hears faintly as everything grays out, “I do think I’ll keep you.” And darkness takes him. 

—

He dreams of blood. 

His head tears open, blood and hunger seeping into him, veins on fire as he’s carried down a swift and furious river running deep red, lamb’s blood, pig’s blood, human blood, flesh, soft and supple and yielding, splitting like the skin on a rotten peach, blood black and purple in the low light gushing sluggishly, a man’s dark face smiling down at him so tender, a hand soft and uncalloused with fingernails long as claws brushing his face, my son, my son, my son, echoing, spiraling deeper and deeper down.

—

Benny wakes to the worst fucking hangover of his life. He’s on his back, on a bed, and that’s about all he can tell without opening his eyes. He gives it a shot and immediately regrets it as too-bright light stabs into his aching head. The world’s lurching, swaying underneath him and his stomach roils threateningly. He tries to sit up without opening his eyes and a sharp pain shoots through his stomach. 

He retches and knows he’s about to be sick, glances around frantically, which only makes it worse, and notices a washroom in a half-closed alcove at the end of the room. He drags himself over to it. A washroom in a bedroom on a boat four times the size of his house, some part of him dimly notices, before he’s sick in the sink. He heaves and to his terror blood comes up, splashes and stains the white sink in gouts that wrack his whole body. It’s over just as soon it began though, and his head feels clearer for it, though now the stabbing in his gut grows worse, and he finally understands the feeling as hunger. 

“I expect you’re feeling poorly,” a soft voice says from somewhere behind him. He hadn’t heard the door open. 

He inclines his head slightly, and Benny catches sight of himself in the little mirror above the sink. It too is speckled with his blood, and through the mess he sees something on his neck. It’s a...bite mark? Not a little love mark either, but like something tore pieces of the skin away in rage. It’s newly scabbing over, angry and purpling, larger and uglier than the little punctures of fanciful movies. His mouth hurts, he realizes, separate from all the other hurts. There’s an ache about his teeth and rooted into his jaws, almost like the feeling after the milk teeth drop, the gums splitting and giving way for something larger. His knees give out abruptly. 

“What’s happening to me?” he rasps. The boy crouches down to eye level where Benny sprawls, still kitten-weak and unable to move. He smiles, and as he does, his lips pull back over needle-like teeth and now, now Benny remembers. 

“You are becoming, my dear,” he replies. 

There’s nothing he can say to that before he’s pulled under again, and the last sensation he feels is the boy gently stroking his head.

—

He wakes again, slow and dragging, the hunger even more viciously painful now, and this time, caution prevents him from opening his eyes fully. He instead slits them open fractionally, allows in the faintest blurry light and slowly widens them, to discover that the light is less painful now than before. He wishes that were more of a comfort. He fumbles in his jacket pocket for his saint suaire, pulls the little prayer book from where it lives tucked against his chest, most days forgotten, holds it tightly, and prays, more fervently than he has ever before in his life. French, English, Latin, jumbled and incomprehensible, the words dissolving into a litany of deliver me, deliver me, deliver me.

He hears footsteps outside and starts badly, tucks the saint suaire back into his breast pocket, and stands, backing away from the door until he can feel the wall at his back. The door opens, and the young man who did this to him steps inside, regarding Benny with something like amusement. 

“Where am I,” he demands, sounding half-delirious and feeling even more so. The boy now doesn’t look like one, looks not so much youthful as frozen, more like a marble statue than anything. He feigns a look of calculation and puts a slender finger to his lips. 

“You are aboard Paradiso still,” he says, “and at this moment we are in the Gulf of Mexico, traveling south to Panama, where we shall make use of the Canal to cross into Pacific waters. From there, we will continue on a South Pacific route, and allow the trade winds to carry us to Australia by winter.” 

The words land like stones, their weight hitting him dully as horror rises slow and shock arrives too late to matter. 

“Take me back,” he stammers, horrified, as the boy laughs in his face. “You have to take me back!”

“I’m afraid that’s out of the question,” the boy says, patently false sympathy lacing every word. “Even if I wanted to, we have a schedule to keep. But just as importantly, I simply don’t want to, Benny. I want you right here.”

“What - what is this? You’re kidnapping me?”

At that, the boy laughs again. “Well, really I think a better term for it might be impressment, but yes, that is correct. Welcome aboard.”

“W-who the Hell are you?!” 

“My name is my own business. But you may call me Father.” He says this with obvious relish. 

“As for what this is, if you haven’t already guessed, I am a vampire. We are all of us vampires. And now you are too. I suppose you could call this our ‘nest’, but  that’s really such a vulgar term, wouldn’t you say?” the boy asks him. “I mean I suppose it’s broadly accurate, but it makes us sound like animals.”

“You — you’re lying. This is insane. This is a sick fuckin’ joke Goddamnit!” he says in desperate, mounting panic. The boy scoffs.

“Hardly. Think of it more as a gift. I’ve made you anew. The man you were before is dead now. Think no more about him, only about what you will be as a part of my crew.”

He beckons, and then when Benny remains where he is, frozen in shock, he rolls his eyes and reaches out, closing his hand tightly enough to be painful around Benny’s wrist. “Come with me, and I’ll take you to meet your new family,” he says. Numbly, Benny obeys. 

He’s led back through the tight corridors, and he still can’t make heads or tails of them. It’s night aboveship, and when Benny looks around, head jerking from side to side fast enough to make him dizzy again, he can’t see land in any direction. Have they been sailing all day? Has more time passed than he can remember? They must be miles out to sea by now. 

A number of men, presumably the crew of the boat, are standing in a rough half-circle, surrounding something that becomes clearer as he moves closer. There’s a man lying bound on the deck, gagged with a kerchief, tied wrist to ankle and left discarded where he was thrown. His eyes are glassy and his body limp, but he’s still alive. Benny’s not sure how he can tell, until he realizes he can hear, as if he were inches from the man’s chest, his heartbeat, slow but shockingly loud. His face has the look of some of the veterans coming back from the War, stone still and grave with horror. Shellshocked. As they approach however, the man’s eyes snap up to follow them, widen in renewed terror, and his heartbeat quickens, louder and louder in Benny’s head until it’s all he can hear and he clamps his hands over his ears to try to shut out the noise. The boy chuckles and Benny starts as he drags Benny’s hand away from one ear like it’s no trouble at all.

With a jolt, he recognizes the prisoner. Not a friend, or anyone close, but a face familiar to him from the breadlines near the docks. They’ve shared jokes and cigarettes, but Benny can’t remember his name. At the same moment, he catches glimpses of strange gashes on the man’s throat and other places, the same bleeding purple marks visible on the skin of his bare chest and through rough tears in the fabric of his coveralls at the thighs. His hand goes without thought to the mottled wound on his own neck, which throbs uneasily as if in response. 

The boy startles him yet again as he says, “Isaak will acquaint you with Paradiso and her crew. I have other matters to attend to presently,” and gestures to a man Benny recognizes as his driver. “You may address your questions to him.”

“Isaak Visser sir,” the driver says. “Pleasure to make your acquaintance!” He’s a cheerful-looking fellow, which is itself not helping. No one should look happy about any of this. 

“Wish I could say the same,” he mutters. Isaak’s smile fades a little, and he claps Benny on the back reassuringly. 

“Come now friend,” he says, “it won’t be so bad as that.”

“I want to go home. I have a family,” his voice is growing louder as panic sets in, but he doesn’t care.

“Well that is the one thing I cannot help you with,” Isaak says with a diffident shrug. “You can’t go home. This is your home now.”

“I’m an American,” he babbles, “I have rights! You can’t just kidnap a man in this country!” That last comes out almost pleading, but Isaak only smiles, a little sadly. 

“But we’re not in America anymore, are we?” he explains, and raises an eyebrow. “And I think there is no one who will come looking for you, correct? If there were someone with money and connections enough to sound the alarm for your rescue, you would not have been selling yourself to my master to begin with now, hmm?”

Cold dread sets in. The man is right. It’ll be another week before Marie expects money and a letter, and if he’s lucky, two weeks after that before she truly worries. Benny has no idea if Marie would go to the authorities at all. He wouldn’t. Why would the police help a poor Acadian woman whose husband by all logic had simply strayed? It’s not as though she’d disbelieve that. 

“Please,” he whispers now, urgently, “I have a wife and daughter. They need me. I’m worth nothing to you. Your master has no need of me. Just let me go, I’ll give you all the money I’ve got.”

“I’m sorry, truly I am,” Isaak says. “But you belong to him now. No pleading with me will help you. And besides, you are not fit for human company anymore.”

“No, wait — what does that mean?!” he frantically demands, but Isaak holds up a hand to quiet him. The boy — the vampire — has an announcement to make. 

“It’s time to finish off what stores we have for, and dispose of our leavings in international waters,” he says. “Drink your fill now, for as most of you know, we cannot take the risk of smuggling any stock, and it could be a week or more before we have prey again.”

The assembled group hangs off his every word, and the bound man, hearing the same, begins to struggle ever-more urgently against his bonds. 

“Well,” he says carelessly, “have at him.” Benny can only watch, terrified, horrified, as the crew descend on the prisoner and rip him to shreds. They tear into him with their teeth, one man each at each wrist and thigh, another at his neck and a sixth at his chest. It revolts him, disgusts him, but he can smell it, on the air. Blood, thick and coppery. He can hear it whooshing in the victim’s veins, under the sick slurping noises of the drinking monsters. It calls to him, calls to the cruel hunger twisting his gut. The hunger is agony, and here is its cure. He shakes with it, this empty ache. It’s worse than two years ago at the first height of the Depression, when he and Marie dragged themselves along on a single pot of porridge a day. He — wants it. 

While they mutilate the man, though, they aren’t looking at him. Without pausing to think and thus to lose his nerve, he sprints to the rail and clambers over it, takes a leap out into the space over the water. All the others on the boat are already scrambling as he hits the water, but he isn’t trying to swim away. In a moment of perfect clarity that breaks through the through the blind panic, he realizes what he has to do. One last mortal sin means nothing against what he’s already done, and if anything, God might forgive him trying to stop himself becoming a monster. He tries to relax in the cold water, goes limp, and lets all the air out of his lungs that he can in one breath. He can feel himself sinking. He descends, but his lungs don’t burn. He doesn’t need to breathe, he realizes. 

A piercing pain stabs through the cold and the fear, and red blossoms in the water. He’s hauled abruptly back as a sick tearing rends through his chest and he opens his mouth to scream and the sea rushes in. He chokes on salt and tries to cough, still tries to scream as the cold vicious sharpness drags him relentlessly up, up and back until his head crowns and bursts through the surface. It’s immediately worse.

The sound that draws ragged out of him isn’t a scream, doesn’t have the strength to be one, is just a thin frantic noise of agony as the water clings and sucks at him. He scrabbles wordlessly at the sky, for something, anything to grab a hold of as all of his weight settles on the thing still stuck fast in his chest, tearing him to ribbons as he chokes and uselessly gulps at air he doesn’t need but can’t force himself not to inhale. He almost hears the awful sick thud seconds before the crushing blow to the back of his head, and mercifully blacks out for a moment. 

Unfortunately, he comes to probably only seconds later, hauled back over the rail with a jolt that grinds metal on rib bone. Benny heaves and vomits salt water all while sounds not strong enough to be screams escape his lips. Blood flows sluggishly from his chest and he finally looks down and sees the cause. He’s been harpooned through the chest. A crewman cuts the line from the harpoon and Isaak draws it forward through the wound and tugs it out of him with another burst of fucking anguish that yet again briefly greys out consciousness. The vampire stands to the side and watches the tableau, looking unimpressed. Benny rolls over onto all fours, shuts his eyes, and with monumental effort, staggers to his feet. 

“You know,” the vampire says conversationally, “It really doesn’t have to be this way. In fact, this sort of adversarial relationship is not at all what I want.”

“Oh?” Benny grunts. “And what is it you want then, kid?”

“I am not a child, boy,” the vampire says with obvious anger.

“Whatever then, Old Man,” he says, bewildered at the correction and in too much pain to argue. This and the ever-increasing hunger are making him dizzy, and it’s everything he can do to keep on his feet. He can’t stop himself from doubling over as another spasm wracks him. 

“Old Man? Hmm, you know, actually, I like that,” the vampire says. “As for what I want, I’ll take your compliance, for now.” He looks thoughtful, and somewhat amused. “Later, we’ll see.” 

“I’m afraid however that despite my regret, I’m going to have to punish you, Benjamin,” he adds. “This acting out, attempting to damage yourself, is unacceptable.”

The vampire lays one hand on his shoulder, and it takes only the gentlest pressure to bring Benny to his knees. His captor caresses his face, pets the top of his head, then closes his fist in Benny’s hair, yanks his head up hard enough to bring tears stinging sharp into his eyes. His young face is still a studied mask of indifference. 

“It wouldn’t have killed you, you know,” he says offhandedly. “There aren’t many ways to destroy our kind. It can be done, of course, but it’s not an easy thing — oh, don’t get too curious, my dear. We can’t have you planning a more successful suicide attempt.” He laughs at Benny’s probable expression. 

“Come now,” the vampire says, face softening. “I promise you it won’t be as bad as all that. In fact, give it time, and I’m sure you’ll come to enjoy your new circumstances immensely.”

He turns away, and gestures to two of the crew, who haul Benny roughly to his feet. “But for now,” the vampire says, “if you can’t appreciate your food, you can go hungry.”

They drag him down into the bowels of the ship again, down past the corridor he’d emerged from before. Down, down, further into the ship than he’d thought possible, they march him, half-carrying him as he stumbles from the pain in his chest and his stomach and his head. They reach a door, and inside is a room, smaller than any of the others he’s seen so far, and throw him in. He lays where he’s fallen, curled up on his side, breathing slow and painful. 

“Let’s see if you’re in a more accommodating mood in a few days, shall we?” the vampire says. “Sleep well, Benjamin,” he adds, and the door to the cell slams shut. There are no lights in this cabin, the only relief. There’s nothing but the creaking of the timbers and the lapping of the waves, and the hunger. 

—

On the first day there’s nothing but the pitching of the boat, the slap of water against the hull, as his stomach aches with hunger and nausea and the wound in his chest alternately throbs and stings. He can’t get comfortable on the small hard cot bolted to the wall, instead curling up on the floor, arms tight around his belly. 

On the second day, the boat moves beneath him. He can feel a vibration so deep in his bones it aches, and he can hear, far better (and so more painful) than he ever could before, the whine and shriek of enormous machinery. They must have reached the Canal, he realizes numbly. The water rises, and Paradiso rises with it, dragged forward by the weight and momentum of an apparatus behemoth enough to move the world. 

By the third day, he barely knows himself. There is only the pain of hunger so fierce it drives all thoughts from his head and all other feeling from his body. Even the open wound next to his heart is nothing in comparison. He’s empty and hollow, and he sobs with unmet need. He can’t think; he can barely move, and he sits curled up in a corner, fists pressed into his stomach.

By the fourth day, he’s begging. He shouts his fervent apologies until his voice gives out and pleads for release, for food, bangs weakly on the walls and hopes for death. No one comes. 

On the fifth day, the man who kidnapped him unlocks the cabin door and steps in, locks it again behind him. There’s a soft whoosh and a gas lamp set in the wall near the door flares painfully bright and then settles. It bathes the room in flickering light, weak enough to cast shadows more than illuminate. He’s brought warm blood in a china bowl, the normality of the dish incongruous. Benny deliriously thinks of his mother bringing him soup in bed when he’d had scarlet fever as a boy. He scrambles to his feet and starts toward him, but the vampire holds up a finger in warning, a gesture which freezes him in his tracks. 

“I could pour this out on the floor and watch you lap at the ground like a dog,” he says bluntly. “I’ll spare you that indignity, provided you behave. Can you act like a civilized man, Benjamin?”

Benny closes his eyes and swallows, painfully. Even standing makes his head swim with hunger. He nods. 

The...Old Man — Benny can't think of him as Father — tuts. “I want to hear you say it,” he reprimands. 

He’s too far gone for pride. He’s well acquainted with the kind of servitude powerful men want.

“Please. Sir. I can act civilized.” it comes out a hoarse whisper. The Old Man nods in approval and sets the bowl down in the center of the small room, takes a step back as Benny stumbles in his haste to reach it. 

It’s not enough, not nearly, but he drains the whole bowl in a matter of moments, licking around the inside as well. The shame is overcome by miserable familiarity. It’s not as though there was ever much to eat before, either. The pounding within his skull and the enveloping fog recede, just slightly. The Old Man comes to take the bowl from his hands, which Benny relinquishes only reluctantly, drained though it is, and sits cross-legged on the floor, pulls Benny down to rest his head in the Old Man’s lap.

“You asked me what I want from you,” he says, gently stroking the top of Benny’s head, like he’s a child in need of calming, or a pet. “I want you to love me, Benny. And you will. Oh, maybe not now, maybe not soon. But one day, you will love me, of your own volition. And we have all the time in the world.”

They remain seated like that for a while, and the petting is strangely soothing, bringing with it a feeling of warmth and respite from the pain. His head still feels full of fog, but it’s not the kind that hunger brings. It feels almost like he’s drugged, on opium or laudanum, a soft, floating bliss separating him from his body. 

“I can take your pain away,” the Old Man murmurs, kissing the top of his head. “We are connected, like I am to all of the nest, and I know all of what any of you feel, and I can change it. Never lie to me, Benny. Never try to plot against me, or raise a hand to me, because I’ll always, always know.”

The words sink into him, burning the knowledge into his heart like a brand, and he knows that he’ll never forget. As much as he is able, he nods, beyond words, and at last, his father smiles. 

“Come now, I think you’ve suffered enough to regret your misbehavior.” He rises to his feet in one fluid motion, then takes Benny by the hand and pulls him up with that same inhuman strength. Benny sways where he stands, still weak from hunger and loopy from the Old Man’s ministrations, and the Old Man guides Benny’s arm around his shoulder, takes Benny’s weight with ease despite his slight frame. He unlatches the door and leads Benny out in the hall, where the light blinds him for a moment, before his eyes adjust. They make their way to one of the crew quarters used as cells at the end of the corridor. 

Inside, there’s a woman shackled to the cot. She must have been here a while, for her fine clothes are filthy tatters, and she’s been brutalized. It’s not just her neck; her throat and forearms are covered with jagged wounds, and she’s desperately, frighteningly pale. The layers of silk of her dress are bunched around her waist, and her thighs are equally maimed. Her eyes are unfocused, and don’t follow the two of them as they enter the room.

The Old Man squeezes the back of his neck, in a way Benny’s not sure is encouragement or warning. “Drink your fill,” he commands, amiably.

Like an automaton, he stumbles to the woman on the cot. It isn’t until he’s standing over her that she seems to become aware of her surroundings at all, because she gives a violent start to see him, and begins to weep. She pulls herself weakly backward, shaking her head as soft noises of dread escape her lips. Some of her wounds are so new they haven’t scabbed over yet, clotted blood crackling as the flesh of her neck moves, and he can smell the iron in the air. Hunger roars back to his full attention at the scent, at the sound of her heart, fluttering in her chest. His new teeth extend against his volition, sliding grotesquely over down over his real ones.

“Please,” the woman whispers. He barely hears the words. He pushes her hair away and grabs at her throat with both hands as she mumbles no , over and over again, and without thinking, without feeling anything except the agony of hunger and the desperate need to not be so, he bites down with an instinctive speed and ferocity he doesn’t know in himself, and drinks.

He’s in ecstasy. All other senses dull as he swallows wetly, lapping and sucking as his teeth gouge at tender flesh to open up the wounds, to get more, more, more . He’s making obscene noises of pleasure, moaning like he’s being fucked, and he doesn’t care, he can’t care, because all that matters is that he’s finally, finally, able to drink his fill. The flow weakens, then thins to a trickle, and he must suck ever harder to get to more. Someone is calling his name, but it doesn’t matter, there are hands at his back, but it doesn’t matter, because he’s not done yet, there’s still more left, he’s sure, he sinks his teeth in deeper and flesh shreds beneath them, tendons crack, until suddenly he’s hauled away by crushing hands at his neck and wrist, digging in hard enough to bruise. He falls backwards, gasping, coughs and blood spills down his front. Someone is shhhing him, and he realizes he’s still making keening noises high in the back of his throat. The senses he took his leave of return to him, and he knows, sudden and awful, all of what he’s done.

The woman is flopped on the cot like a rag doll, limbs splayed and neck at an angle like a hen at market. Blood’s sopped down the length of her fine dress, and he can feel it, tacky, cooling, on his own clothes. She’s deathly white. 

“Well, you’ve left little to salvage, my dear.” the Old Man remarks. He sounds amused. Horror rises alongside gorge in Benny’s throat as he takes in the tableau. 

“No,” he whispers futilely, “no please God, no — ” He lets out a cry that sounds barely human, scrambling backward away from the woman and scrubbing at his face. His hands are just as bloody as all the rest of him.

“God isn’t the master to whom you should be looking for salvation,” the Old Man says, and yet again, the monster laughs, laughs like all of this is a fucking joke instead of some kind of neverending, waking nightmare. 

“Don’t worry dear,” the Old Man continues, “this is normal for a first feed. In truth, I suspected it might be best to wait with you, let you drink alone and have your fill without other eyes on you. It is a shame about the dress though,” he says, lips quirked as though this whole nightmare is no more than a mildly funny diversion. “We could have sold it, or found some other use for the silk. We’re not as frivolous as all that, out here on the sea. Waste not.”

“Please,” he moans, “why are you doing this to me?”

“Well, this, in particular, isn’t my doing. I am not the one who killed off one of our stock in a single feed. As to why, really, as I’ve already said, this is a gift; you should really be grateful. It could just as easily have been you in this cell.” 

All this time, he’s been numb, in too much pain and delirium to think clearly, let alone stop himself. Now, the full atrocity of what all he’s done washes over him. He’s damned. He killed someone, ate her. Another human being is dead, and he’s the one who did it. He allows himself to be led, half-carried, back through the corridors to the room where he first woke after the change. The Old Man guides him to the bed and maneuvers him to sit, then helps him remove his bloodied clothes. The threads of his shirt are caught fast in the blood on his chest, but strangely, the sucking wound has mostly healed. He stays where he’s been moved, unthinking, choked by revulsion, and the Old Man takes a basin of water and a cloth and gently cleans his face and chest, whispering all the while words Benny hasn’t the capacity to understand. When this task is finished, the Old Man pushes him to lie back down and tucks him in like a child, still with his soothing nothings. 

“You’ll adjust to this,” he says tenderly, “I promise you.” He kisses the top of Benny’s head and then he takes his leave. 

For his own part, all Benny can do is lie in bed, incapable of moving, numb but for the drowning well of bone-deep horror. Hours pass. The day breaks, the sun warms the room as it crests the sky and falls back below the horizon, and in all that time he doesn’t move. He doesn’t sleep, but nor does he recall the hours passing. The time just slips away. 

—

Some while must pass. Maybe a day, maybe more, he isn’t sure. Eventually, the Old Man returns, and he actually knocks on the door before he enters. He doesn’t wait for permission, naturally, but then, Benny’s hardly capable of giving it. He says more things that don’t register, get lost somewhere in Benny’s head, and he doesn’t realize why that is until the Old Man addresses him in French instead of English.

— The theatrics are wearing a little thin, Benny, — he says, and in his mother tongue, or close enough, the words at least make sense. 

— I’m sorry, — he says, voice hardly above a whisper, — I’m sorry. —

— I can’t spend all my time holding your hand, my dear, — the Old Man says. — You’ll have to learn to accept what you are sooner or later. —

The Old Man pets the top of his head, and picks up something he’d set on the floor earlier. It’s another bowl of blood.

— You can have this for now, but eventually you’re going to have to feed as the rest of us do, — he says, a note of warning in his tone. Benny looks up at him, his lovely face barely restraining annoyance, and feels, inexplicably, deeply guilty for the trouble he’s causing. He takes the bowl and drinks it quickly, gives it back to the Old Man, who turns to the door.

“Your French is atrocious, truly,” he says in English with cruel amusement. “Somehow you manage to speak it in a tongue more vulgar than even Sorento — though, I suppose it makes some sense. After all, you’re really just a different kind of creole.” He leaves after that, and locks the door behind him. 

Benny sits up with his back against the wall, arms around his knees, and breathes out. He looks down at his hands and notices in a detached sort of way that they’re red from the blood he spilled in his haste. With no direction from his mind, he raises a hand to his mouth and licks it clean, thinking nothing, feeling nothing. When he’s done, he does the other. He’s still hungry. 

He tries not to think about it.

—

It’s another week of living fully in the cell-like quarters before the Old Man finally decides Benny’s not gonna try another suicide attempt, and deems him trustworthy enough to allow back topside. By this time, according to Isaak, they’ve nearly made it to the Galapagos Islands. Charles Darwin wrote his heretical books about the Galapagos, Benny vaguely recalls. He’s always wanted a chance to read them. He spares a moment to wonder if the Old Man is likely to have copies in his library, then shoves down the interest that piques. He doesn’t have the right to wish for entertainment.

There are six crew on the Paradiso, he finds after his first week. They regard him with some bemusement. Along with the Paradiso, which he figures is either a very large boat or a very small ship, there are five other craft in the fleet, all much smaller and crewed by three or four apiece. They keep in loose but controlled formation with the flagship, and at any moment there’s one each flanking to port and starboard, two behind, and one much farther ahead, scouting for other vessels on the water. They communicate with their leader via radio, the Old Man confident in commanding them. 

The Old Man explains all this to him in greater detail each night after he’s been allowed on deck again. They stand and watch the ocean as the crew busy themselves elsewhere, the Old Man in his element and eager to teach. He expounds to him on all of his passions, including, currently, the importance of the Canal in the fleet’s travels. 

“It’s a miracle of modern engineering,” he says, an excited look in his eye. “Nearly thirty thousand men laid down their lives for its completion. It’s been absolutely life-changing these past fifteen years. I almost can’t recall how we ever managed before.”

Benny nods, staring out to sea and only half-listening. He’s still wondering what exactly could kill him, though by now it hardly seems worth it to try. He’s already a murderer. 

“The only other route to the Pacific is ‘round Cape Horn,” the Old Man continues, “down the very southernmost tip of South America and back up the other side. A Dutchman first sailed it, so naturally I feel some pride in how many times I’ve successfully navigated it. As stirring as that may be, however, these days I prefer the monetary expense of Panama over the many risks we used to incur sailing south.”

The Old Man pauses in his musing as he realizes he’s being ignored. His eyes narrow suddenly, and Benny realizes his hand has strayed yet again to his saint suaire.

“What is that in your pocket you keep fondling?” he demands. 

“Nothing, it’s nothing,” Benny says, too quickly. 

“My dear, I’m afraid you don’t have the right to hide things from me,” he says, offhandedly, and plucks the saint suaire lightly from Benny’s fingers. He flips through the fragile pages, and surprisingly, he seems to recognize it. 

“How curious,” the Old Man murmurs. “I haven’t seen a devotional like this in centuries.” 

“Please, it’s not important, just give it back,” he pleads, though he knows by begging for it he’s proved himself a liar, shown just how vitally important it is. 

“You superstitious hillfolk, you’ll believe just about anything. This, however?” he taunts, a wicked smile on his face striking fear in Benny’s heart. “This is pure heresy!”

“It would be remiss of me to allow you to keep this,” he says, and the moment freezes for an instant, then cracks, shatters, and to Benny’s abrupt horror, he tosses the saint suaire over the rail with a quick flick of his wrist. He lunges to dive after it, but abortively jerks back as the Old Man holds up a hand, and the playful cruelty flattens into cold disdain. 

“I wouldn’t attempt to fetch it,” he says. “As you should know by now, I have no qualms about dragging you back. You see, it’s not the sin of idolatry that concerns me, Benny. It’s just that I will not compete with Christ for your devotion.” His lip curls slightly in contempt. “Nor, for that matter, will I accept your kind’s slavish reverence toward His mother.”

He blinks, as though suddenly amused. “Forgive me, that was terribly sectarian for these enlightened times. Don’t worry,” the Old Man chuckles, “my days of burning Catholics are long behind me.”

He looks out across the ocean contemplatively, as Benny hugs himself, still speechless with dread. 

“We are a family here, Benny,” he says. “And much like any family, the father sits at its head. This is as true of God as it is of man.”

He turns and fixes Benny with a sharp look. “Do you understand that, Benjamin?” he asks. “Tell me you understand.”

“I understand,” he says quickly. “Sir. Father.”

“Good,” the Old Man says, and just like that he’s all smiles again, like turning on a light. 

—

They sight the islands the next morning, while Benny and all but the lookout are asleep. That night, another boat sails up alongside Paradiso. It’s much smaller, though probably still large by the standards of a sailboat, and elegant in its lines. The Old Man takes him to greet its occupants. 

“Now that you’ve accustomed yourself somewhat, I’m afraid you cannot live as a guest,” he explains. “All men must work on my vessels, yourself included. You’ll need to accustom yourself to working on the fleet.”

The man who climbs easily over the side of the boat and strides with such graceful command to the Old Man’s side is introduced to him as Sorento. He has light brown skin, tightly curled black hair, and cunning eyes above sharp cheekbones. He is utterly lovely, albeit more pretty than handsome. He greets the Old Man with a kiss, which Benny suspected he might, but he doesn’t seem all that happy to do it. 

“I’ve told you about our newest crew member,” the Old Man says, by way of introduction. “He’s still new to the sea. You’ll be taking him on with you on the Batavia. I expect you’ll teach him well.”

“Do I get a choice about this?” Benny asks sourly, as though he doesn’t know the answer already. He says it, and immediately winces at his tone. Both the Old Man and Sorento regard him, unimpressed. 

“No,” the Old Man says blandly. “If I’m going to keep you, you’ll have to earn your keep. And that starts by learning how to sail, which you can’t really do on Paradiso. It wasn’t a mistake taking you on, was it?” The last question is dangerous, and it fills him with a noxious dread that he thinks might not be entirely his own emotion, and he stares at his feet, unable to meet the Old Man’s eyes. 

“No. Sir,” he says. He doesn’t want to die. Not now. Not because of this. 

“Good,” the Old Man says, suddenly the picture of cheerful again. “Then it’s settled. Go along with Sorento then.”

He climbs over the side of the massive boat, not daring to look down into the water he knows won’t be his salvation, and cautiously sets foot on the smaller one. He looks back up at Paradiso, where his captor waves at him like a tourist waving at a steamliner. 

“So long for now, Benny!’ he calls. “It might be as much as a month before I’ll see you again, depending on how successful the fleet is in bringing in a new prize.”

For his part, Benny says nothing, just raises his own hand and lowers it again in a pantomime of a similar wave. The boom on the smaller boat swings ‘round and they pull away. Once again, he’s trapped somewhere new that he doesn’t want to be, no way out and no allies. He shivers in the chill night air out on the open deck, and watches with ever-growing disquiet as the huge boat shrinks into the distance.

“She’s not gonna stay close by?” he ventures to ask. Sorento nods.

“Father likes to keep Paradiso hidden from the rest of the fleet over the horizon line,” he says. “She’s not exactly inconspicuous.”

“Welcome to the Batavia,” the other sailor offers. The three of them regard each other, somewhat awkwardly. He remembers the Old Man’s remark about Sorento also speaking French, and decides to test that. 

“D’où êtes-vous?” he asks, and Sorento’s eyes narrow. 

He’s quiet for a moment, and wordlessly assesses Benny. “Ayiti,” he answers finally. Ah. A different kind of Creole, indeed. 

Sorento then introduces him to the other man, in English again. His name is Carlos, and he’s friendly enough, if reserved. Notably, he doesn’t have Sorento or Quentin’s looks. It seems most of the crew doesn’t. 

Carlos shows him around the boat, as little as there is to see. There isn’t a galley on the Batavia. It’s been stripped and converted to allow for more bunk space, which is a necessity on the small boat. There is, however, something far worse. The narrow ship’s head has a steel door, which is bolted and padlocked shut. Inside, as Sorento shows him via a sliding window that opens from without, a naked man is shackled by a short length of chain to the wall. 

Benny stares in open shock. He shouldn’t be. Shocked, that is. He’s already a murderer; he needs blood to live. It stands to reason every boat in the fleet has something like this, but somehow the brutality of this cramped, foetid cell just brings ever fresh horror to his new circumstances. All of a sudden he can’t breathe, needs to be out of the tiny cabin and clammy, still air. He backs away and stumbles up the steps out onto the starlit deck. Sorento, unfortunately, follows him up. 

“We have some food and water supplies to feed the livestock,” he says as though he hadn’t been interrupted by Benny’s flight from below, “but don’t worry about it sickening; it’ll die eventually, and we’ll have to hunt again before it does.”

“He’s chained up in there. In a cage,” he breathes. 

“Don’t worry about that,” Sorento says breezily. “It can’t escape. The lock is very secure.”

“What — you’re not just gonna leave him there?” he says, alarmed.

“I said, don’t worry about it,” Sorento says, more irritable now. “If you’re hungry let me know, I’ll open the cage for you. If it’s the head you’re concerned about, just piss over the side like the rest of us. Otherwise, leave it alone.”

“I - I’m sorry,” he says, “It’s just a lot to take in, is all. I never asked for this,” he adds miserably. 

“So? You aren’t the only one. Get used to it,” Sorento says impatiently. “This is your life. You don’t have anything else anymore.”

He looks out at the expanse of sea and the night time sky in all its heavenly glory, and feels impossibly small, dwarfed by the alien vastness of a world so much bigger than he could ever have imagined. He is nothing, nobody, not worth knowing or searching for, and he is utterly, utterly alone. 

—

“The sun’s coming up,” Sorento says, after hours of ignoring Benny. “You should try to get some sleep.”

Sorento takes the private sleeping arrangement at the back, in the focsle, due to his seniority. Benny and Carlos each take the long, narrow fold-out benches in the saloon, a small and uselessly thin pillow and threadbare blanket apiece. Carlos doesn’t seem thrilled to have another crewman sleeping inches from him, but he’s kind enough not to complain about it. 

Benny tries to sleep, he really does. He lays back on the hard bench’s thin mattress with the blanket pulled up near to his chin, and tiredly watches as the sun creeps higher into the sky through a crack in the curtains pulled over the boat’s round windows. He lays like that for what feels like hours, but can’t be more than a few minutes, given how little the light’s changed. 

He can’t do this. He can’t stand it. He rises from the tiny bunk, and glances across at Carlos, by all appearances fast asleep. He grits his teeth and crosses himself for good measure, then tentatively creeps toward the cage. He’s not sure what he’ll do about the padlock, but he’ll think of something. He has to. 

He lurches in sudden sick fear as he hears, in French, — Don’t do it. — 

It's Sorento. Of course it is. Who else would it possibly be? He closes his eyes as dread washes over him. He can’t bring himself to turn and look. A hand falls on his shoulder, and though there’s no force to it, he flinches anyway. 

— I’m not going to hurt you, — Sorento says, voice low and deliberately calm. — Turn and look at me. —

Benny does so. Sorento is leaning against the doorframe, carefully holding himself outside the thin band of sunlight that sneaks through the portholes’ heavy curtains. He looks weary, resigned. 

— It’s not worth it, — he says bluntly, then before Benny can protest, goes on. — For one thing, where would you go? You’re outnumbered, you and your little human friend, and for all your size you’re not much of a fighter, are you? And even if you did somehow overpower us and kill us, what then? You know nothing about sailing or the sea, you’re scarcely three miles away from the rest of the fleet, and here’s the worst of it: you haven’t any food. You could kill me and Carlos, and perhaps attempt to escape the fleet unnoticed, and maybe even sail the Batavia just the two of you back to the closest land, assuming you could navigate well-enough to find it, but what happens when you get hungry? There’s nothing to eat aboard this boat except the human you wish to save. Sooner or later, hunger would get the better of you. It’s a fact of nature. And if you did the noble thing and killed yourself, it — he — couldn’t sail her alone. — 

He sighs, and he looks genuinely regretful. — It’s an honorable impulse, I won’t deny that. But you would have failed, regardless. —

Benny’s hands find their way to his face, and he presses the palms hard enough into his eyes to hurt, and see stars. — How do you live like this? — he asks, voice hoarse and muffled into his hands. — How can you accept it? —

— Because I’d rather live like this than be dead, — Sorento says simply. As though there was nothing more to it than that. 

— Go back to bed, — he says then, gruffly, as if to cover for the kindness he’s just shown. — There’s plenty of work to be done this evening, and you don’t want to be tired. —

Benny obeys.

—

The next evening, his hunger makes its undeniable presence known, yet again. Sorento notices his wince of pain, of course, and frowns at him, exasperated. “Just do it,” he says. “Don’t make every time you have to feed into a fucking philosophical argument. You have to eat, it’s dying anyway, just do it. You’re making life harder for all of us.”

He doesn’t have it in him to be stubborn right now, not with the pain ripping through him yet again. He grits his teeth and nods, and Sorento mutters, “finally,” and goes to unlock the door of the cage. The man’s eyes widen and he tries to talk through the gag, struggles against the handcuffs, but the scrapes and abrasions where the cuffs have cut into his wrists only bring blood closer to the surface of his skin. Benny can hear his rabbit-fast heart, can almost taste him already. He kneels in the cramped space, breathes in deep and smells the copper-iron scent above the stink of the unwashed man. The man struggles, still trying to scream through the gag, but Benny hardens his heart, bends his neck to the other man’s throat, and sinks his teeth in deep. He drinks. He relishes the feeling, the hot blood pouring down his throat, and it fills him, makes some empty part of him whole again, and that’s the worst part. It’s all so natural. 

Sorento shakes him sharply by the shoulder, and with great reluctance, he pulls himself away. The man throws himself as far away from Benny as the restraints will allow, which isn’t very. 

“You have to work on your self-control,” Sorento says, as Benny rises shakily and shoves out of the cage and away from the sobbing, moaning man. “And clean your face. You’ve got blood all over your mouth.”

All he can think as he takes the rag Carlos offers and wipes his face is, at least I didn’t kill anyone this time. Yet.  

—

Over the next few weeks, Sorento teaches him about the boat. He learns what the sails are called (the mainsail and jib) and why they’re shaped as they are, what they do, and how to trim them. He learns how to read the winds and the weather, how to spot and avoid storms out on the vast Pacific. 

The lessons are interesting, and the labor isn't bad. He enjoys the feeling of the work, the broad strength of his back. He takes to the moon and the salt and the swaying waves more easily than he thought he might, though still he frequently looks out at the sea and will for a moment feel terribly exposed by the wide open expanse of empty water. He misses the daylight. He misses home.

Sorento will sometimes talk to him in French, though not often, for Carlos’s sake. Carlos’s native tongue is Brazilian Portuguese, and the French that he knows he’s mostly picked up traveling around Polynesia in the Old Man’s fleet. Benny gathers that French as he knows it isn’t actually Sorento’s mother tongue anyway. The Haitians’ Creole is wholly separate. They can understand each other, mostly, but they’re not speaking the same language.

One night with nothing better to do, he asks some of the questions that've been on his mind the last few days. He’s sitting at the top of the steps leading down into the cabin, while Sorento stands at the starboard railing, looking out. Carlos is at the radio setup inside, only half-listening, but despite his posture, Sorento is in a more forthcoming mood than usual. 

“Have there ever been any women?” he asks. Somehow he doubts it, given the Old Man’s comments about marriage that very first night, but he’s curious. 

“Oh, occasionally,” Sorento says, looking entirely disinterested. “If he has need of someone to play the role of wife for a long stretch. There have been a few special ones over the centuries, or so I’ve been told. But mostly, no. He prefers his boys. Like us,” he adds, giving Benny a disdainful once-over.

“If he likes us so much, what’re we doin’ here?” he says, gesturing around him at the Batavia in general. 

“Quentin lives on Paradiso more or less full-time, because he’s useless, but I am actually competent enough to captain a vessel of my own. Presumably Father hopes you will be as well.”

Another, more important question next. “Does he kill when we’re no longer fun for him?”

Sorento shrugs. “Sometimes,” he says, tilting his hand from side to side noncommittally. “He only tends to execute those who have profoundly angered him, and while he has a temper, he rarely feels it that deeply or for very long. Mostly when the crew turns over, it’s been other pirates, various navies, the occasional fight that gets out of hand. Hunters, I suppose, though they’re rarely at sea.”

Benny’s not sure what a hunter is in this context, though he supposes there is an obvious answer. He’ll ask about it later. 

“He’s not a real pirate,” Carlos says with some bleak amusement. “If he were, he’d be accountable to his crew.”

“Privateers had a strict naval hierarchy,” Sorento adds, by way of explanation. “Pirates, in the old days, at least, held elections for captaincy. You can tell what line of work Father was actually in, despite how romantically he styles himself.”

Bennys nods, granting him the point, and smiles mirthlessly. 

Sorento has his own story, as all of them do. 

“I was born a few years before the Revolution in Haiti,” he says, back stiff and jaw tight. “My father — my actual father — owned a plantation. My mother was his house girl. When the war arrived at their doorstep, she slew him in his bed. Because of her, I came of age a free man.” He pauses, staring out at the waves. 

“And look at me now,” he adds, quietly.

Carlos interrupts their silent moment, emerging from below with his radio headphones around his neck, urgent and excited.

“It’s the Andromeda II. We’ve got her in range.”

“What’s that?” Benny asks, feeling slow and stupid as Sorento leaps to his feet and ducks under the boom to join Carlos back down below. He beckons for Benny to follow him. 

“One of the craft we’ve been trailing,” he explains, “they’re finally out of radio range of that steamliner to the north. It’ll be us or John’s crew on the Argo, but we’re the closest.” He nods at Carlos. “Put out the call.”

“We’re sending a distress signal across all frequencies,” he elaborates for Benny’s benefit. “We don’t want to be in range of a larger vessel, especially not anything big, or any kind of naval ship, that might think to come to our aid. There’s no one in these waters but us and that yacht. Now,” he says, with no small relish, “now, we go hunting.”

—

They jury-rig the mainsail to the jib-boom to make it look like the mast is broken. It’s an obvious trick from the boat itself, but will be apparently quite convincing from a distance. The Andromeda II sails in close, as close as she can get, and the crew on board prepare hooks and line to pull the two boats together. Before the second boat closes in, Carlos hands Benny a revolver. “Don’t use it,” he says, deadpan. “You might have guessed we want them alive.” 

A line flies across the distance and Carlos catches it single-handedly, reels in the Andromeda II with more strength than the other boat’s occupants are expecting. They pitch with the movement, and one of them falls to the deck. With this distraction, Sorento leaps with inhuman ferocity the full three yards across the water to the other boat. Carlos follows without a second thought. Benny hesitates for an instant before fear of the consequences of disobedience outweighs his doubts as to how far he can jump. He leaps, mostly expecting to hit the water a few feet over the side, and is quite surprised when he easily bridges the distance and lands, stumbling, on the deck. 

There is no true fight. They can’t move with the speed of the vampires in Bram Stoker’s book, but they are stronger, and faster, and despite the Andromeda II’s superior numbers, everyone on board is rounded up and herded onto the Batavia in mere minutes. One of the young men, dressed in the finery of a wealthy American yachter, lunges for Sorento, and receives a blow to the head and a vicious cut to the face for his troubles. This swift act of violence (and the presence of the guns) is enough to dissuade the others. 

There are six, all told. The young man and his wife, an equally rich friend of theirs, a serving girl, and two sailors. 

“Gag them,” Sorento orders, “then dose them with laudanum.” 

“Why bother?” Benny asks, not expecting an answer. 

“If you hit them too hard, they die, and trust me, it’s better not having to listen to the constant screaming,” Carlos says, shrugging. He and Sorento wrestle one of the crewmen to the deck, binding his hands quickly and shoving a rag in his mouth. Another is pressed against the man’s nose, and he struggles only briefly before sinking into a stupor, half-conscious. Benny stands stupidly in a corner, useless, until Sorento shakes him by the shoulder. 

“You’re not exempt from the work,” he says, irritated, as usual. “Help us.”

He shoves Benny towards the other prisoners. 

“Don’t damage them,” he says, “if they’re too wounded, they’ll die quickly, and if they sicken, it’ll poison the blood and make them inedible.”

“A prize like this could be noticed. We must be careful to erase as much evidence as possible, and put as many miles between us and the wreck as we can.” Sorento bounds lightly back to the Andromeda II and scuppers the boat as easily as punching multiple holes through the sleek reinforced wood below the waterline. Before it can start taking on water in earnest, he jumps back again. The whole affair is over in the span of twenty minutes.

Obviously, there’s no room in the cage for the six new prisoners. Carlos bundles them below deck and stands watch, training his gun on the lot. Sorento radios Paradiso . 

“Father wants us to reach the Marquesas no later than August,” he says, somewhat distractedly. “If we’re lucky, and careful, we won’t need to take another prize ‘til then, but six isn’t much to last us that long. We need at minimum ten healthy humans across all six craft to feed on at any given moment. We’re short two.”

One of the women, the servant girl, hears this and gasps. Sorento stands and backhands her, and all of the prisoners exclaim before Carlos’s gun silences them again. He grabs her face, twisting it this way and that, examining her. 

“Only six humans good enough to feed on,” Sorento says grimly, contemplating the wisp of a girl, and then, so softly it’s near impossible to hear, “it’s not enough. It’s not ever enough.” He shuts his eyes and breathes deep, runs his hands through his hair. “Okay, fine, who’s most in need right now? One will have to go to the Parel. Piotr finished his stock three days ago. And John’s crew can’t keep theirs alive much longer.” 

He clenches his jaw for just a moment, then sighs. “The fat one goes to Father,” he says tiredly, and gestures to the largest of the sailors. “If he’s in a generous mood, I might be able to convince him to give us what’s left of his current livestock. He glances at Benny, looks him up and down, seething anger and something predatory in his eyes. 

 “We didn’t need another mouth to feed,” Sorento says quietly. “We could have made a long meal of you, Benny, big as you are. But our Father took a liking to you, and now you’re here.”

He shoves the bound and now sobbing maidservant to the floor, where her face, unprotected with her hands tied behind her, hits the wood with a sick thud. Benny watches a chip likely from a tooth fly off into a corner as she yelps in shock and pain, and tries not to visibly shudder. 

“You didn’t have to do that,” he says, caught between fear and anger. Sorento rounds on him furiously. 

“Get manman ou, you sanctimonious bastard,” he snarls. “You understand nothing. I know Father likes you well enough to excuse your insubordination right now, mon cher,” and that last is bitingly sarcastic, “but you can’t keep criticizing the way things are run here. There’s a reason we operate as we do, and believe me, you’re not the first to try to disrupt things. I expect you can imagine what happens to crewmen who put themselves above the good of the fleet.” 

He turns on his heel and stalks from the cabin. Benny frantically glances between the door and the prisoners. Carlos raises an eyebrow. “Go after him if you want, but he’s always been a high-strung prick. He’ll cool off eventually.”

Benny does go after him. Sorento is standing at the bow, staring out at the sea with a storm in his eyes. 

— I’m sorry,” — he says. Sorento’s knuckles are white on the railing, his head bowed. 

— You think I’m no different from my father, — he spits. — Either one. —

— I don’t think that, — Benny says cautiously. — I think you’re trapped here too. —

— Just like you. Two half-breed masisi stupid enough to be charmed by a well-spoken monster, — he says dully. — You know, Carlos actually chose this. Father asked him to join the fleet, and he said yes. —

— I didn’t know that, — Benny says. Sorento gives him a long, unreadable look. 

— Most of the crew are here of their own volition, — he says. — But we aren’t like the rest of them. —

Benny’s not sure what to say to that, so he says nothing. It’s easy to look out to the sea when avoiding words, so the two of them do that until the Batavia sights Paradiso in the distance.

—

After the hunt, the smaller boats all converge on Paradiso once more. The Batavia pulls alongside her, and the crew lets down a ladder and ropes. The prisoners are strapped to boards and hauled to the deck for the Old Man’s inspection, and Benny and the rest of the Batavia’s men dutifully follow. Benny hangs back and waits, hoping for a moment to speak to the Old Man alone. 

He’s determined to make it up to Sorento. He isn’t sure if he should be concerned for his status among the crew, but convincing the Old Man to allocate the prisoners (he still can’t think of them as livestock) more fairly might at least put him back in the others’ good graces. 

“Sir — uh, Father — wait,” he calls. The Old Man turns back to him, looking mildly surprised.

“Yes?”

“I actually wanted to ask you a favor, if I could,” he says hesitantly. The Old Man raises an eyebrow. 

“Go on,” he says amiably.

“Do you think we could keep another one of the prisoners on the Batavia? The man we have is nearly dead.” The words sound strange and awful coming out of his mouth, like someone else is saying them. 

The Old Man laughs out loud at that. “Oh, Sorento put you up to this, didn’t he?” He rolls his eyes. “I shouldn’t be surprised. He gets like this every time I bring someone new on. Jealous, you see, though he plays it off as disapproval and concern about having enough to eat. He tests all of my new ones.”

That doesn’t really sound like what Sorento was doing. “No, actually,” he says. “He doesn’t know I’m asking.”

He snorts. “Well, either way, it’s not easy to buy your way into his good graces. Believe me, I know.” 

“So,” Benny presses, hoping he isn’t going too far, “can we have one?” The Old Man looks like he’s actually considering it. 

“Stay with me a few nights,” he says at last. “We’ll talk it over. Sorento and Carlos won’t have to share what’s left with you; that should mollify them for now. Besides, I’ve missed your company these past few weeks.”

He calls Sorento over briefly. “I’ll keep Benny for the next few nights. It’s only about a week until we reach land — I am fully confident you two can manage without him.” 

“As you like, Father,” Sorento says, and dutifully leans into the kiss the Old Man gives him, a possessive hand curled around the back of his neck. 

—

“Come share my bed with me,” the Old Man suggests once the other boats have taken off.

“I take that’s not a request?” Benny asks, but to his surprise, his new master just laughs. 

“You don’t have to, obviously. It’s just that you seem to be having such a difficult time adjusting, I thought I would offer to take your mind off things. I can make you feel better, smooth out the edges.”

“Ah, maybe. Maybe later?” he tries to soften the no, for all the good it will do. The Old Man shrugs. 

“If that’s what you want,” he says. 

They retire to the Old Man’s library instead, where Benny wanders nervously around the room, examining the books to cover how he’s unable to sit still. The bookshelves wrap around most of the room below the large windows, and the center of the room is occupied by a number of comfortable couches and chairs, all presumably priceless antiques. The Old Man opens a teak cabinet to reveal a wine rack, and pulls out a bottle to decant. He pulls a vial out of the breast pocket of his waistcoat and unstoppers it, drops some liquid even darker than the wine into it. 

“Would you like a glass?” he asks when he’s done, pouring himself a glass. Benny stares dubiously at the drink. 

“It’s just wine,” the Old Man insists, but with a cheeky, almost mischievous grin. “...with a few drops of blood taken from a dead man mixed in. It’s potent stuff. Drink too much, or too old, and it will poison you. But a little, heavily diluted, has more of an effect than alcohol alone. The wine is a fine vintage, but does little enough for our kind on its own.” 

He laughs. “I do, actually, drink wine.”

Benny has actually had the opportunity to see that particular film. “Your sense of humor runs to the cliché,” he says dryly, and the Old Man laughs. “Oh, perhaps,” he allows, “but I have to get my entertainment somewhere.”

“I guess I wouldn’t have expected you to care much for something so vulgar as recent cinema,” he says, and takes the offered glass. The two of them take seats on the couches built into the walls between the bookshelves, facing each other. It’s comfortable, in deep contrast to the constant motion and lack of privacy on the Batavia.  

“I had to see if Hollywood would do Stoker’s novel justice,” the Old Man says. “Especially given the travesty Murnau made of it in ‘22. I’m very partial to that book, as inaccurate a depiction of creatures like us as it is.”

“I wouldn’t say they did it justice,” he says lightly, and the Old Man bursts into laughter. Benny’d seen the movie in New Orleans when he’d come into a little more money than usual, and it had intrigued him enough to look for a copy of the thirty-six year old book it was based on.

“No,” the Old Man says when he’s recovered himself some, “they did not. Certainly the film had no intention of exploring Harker’s relationship with the Count.”

Of course that would be what interested the Old Man most. He can’t say it didn’t interest him. But Benny doesn’t have a group of loyal compatriots to aid him here, and Marie, well. God forgive him this insult, but she’s no Mina Harker. He swirls the wine around the delicate crystal glass, and takes a drink. It just tastes like wine to him. 

“Can I ask you something?” he says, after they’ve sat in surprisingly companionable silence for a moment or two.

“Of course. You aren’t necessarily entitled to an answer, but you can always ask.”

“Why me?” He's not expecting an answer, but the Old Man smiles warmly.

“Because I saw you, there on the docks, and I wanted you,” he says. “You had an animal desperation to you, as so many of the trade boys do, but under that, I knew you enjoyed it.”

He draws breath to protest instinctively, but the Old Man places a finger over his lips and he stops himself. 

“You don't have to believe it, but that doesn't make it any less the truth.”

"M'not much to look at." It doesn't bother him to say. 

“Oh, I disagree,” he purrs. “You're so strong." He pauses, regards Benny with something like infatuation. "Of character, moreso even than build. I wanted to tame you.”

“I think you’ve achieved that,” he says, a touch bitterly, but the Old Man snorts. “Not at all,” he says. “If I had managed that, I’d have got you to let go of your problem with naming the lobsters by now.”

“I’m — trying,” he says tightly. “Lord forgive me,” he adds under his breath, and the Old Man sets his glass down with a long-suffering look. The playful good-humor shifts, and annoyance chases the warmth from his face. 

“I don’t want to hear that kind of talk anymore,” he says testily. 

“What kind of talk?” Benny asks, as though he doesn’t know. 

“Prayer,” he says. “Entreatments to any power higher than me.”

“I thought you believed in God,” he says. 

“I am your God,” the Old Man says, and stares at Benny, deadly serious. Benny tenses, waiting for the moment of sudden violence, but then the Old Man just laughs. “Oh, don’t worry for your soul, you silly Catholic. You aren’t going to die any time soon anyway.” He shrugs. 

“Maybe I believed in God at one point,” he says. “But that was so many centuries ago, and the memory cheats. Certainly at one point in my life I was happy to use religion as a justification for war, but sometimes I’m not sure if I truly believed even then. If I did, I know better now. After all, why should I believe in an absent God who dares not show His face, when I know the truth of myself. When you look at me, you don’t see a mere man. I am more than any human could ever be. You are too — or at least, you could be, if you’d just stop holding yourself back.”

“I - I’m sorry. I can’t — ”

“Why?” he asks, and he seems less frustrated than genuinely puzzled. “Why does it bother you, why does it matter, the deaths of humans you don’t know, entirely unimportant, unmissed people?”

It matters, he wants to answer, of course it matters, but he can’t speak to say the words, can’t find a way to make them make sense outside himself. It shouldn’t be difficult to argue that killing people, eating people, is wrong, but right now, at least, he can’t even think to himself why. 

“One day I must show you an orca run,” the Old Man says, “then maybe I can demonstrate better what I mean. They hunt in packs, did you know? Working together, they isolate and kill their prey, then share the feast. They’re quite intelligent.” 

“If a predator kills a lesser beast to survive,” he goes on, sipping from his own glass, “we don’t assign moral culpability to the stronger animal. I understand there are some cultures that abstain from the slaughter of livestock for meat, but you wouldn’t have turned down the opportunity for a steak dinner had you the money. Don’t tell me you wept for every fish you caught, or balked at wringing a chicken’s neck. No animal wants to die, but that is just the accepted way of things. It’s natural to feel some disconcertion at a meal that might talk back but it will pass. You are simply a higher order of animal.” 

The Old Man’s voice is gentle, like a parent reasoning with a stubborn child. It’s difficult not to feel like one. The spiked wine must be going to his head, because he feels too warm, slow and stupid and pliable. The Old Man’s hand is on his thigh. 

“We’re not animals,” he insists, but even to him, he sounds weak. The Old Man purses his lips in restrained annoyance. 

“I’ve given you so much,” he says, “and for all that, you aren’t very grateful. My time and affection are not unlimited, and a working fleet has little enough to spare for petulance. I allow you to be who you really are. Would you prefer to be impoverished, wracked by theological self-loathing and unhappily married?” 

It’s difficult to argue that. Some last small vestige of humanity tries to remind him of Dot, and all his failures of duty, but just now, he can hardly recall her face. That should alarm him, horrify him. But he’s sinking into a sort of bliss, and it’s difficult to argue. Everything the Old Man says just makes so much sense. 

“You act as though I am some unyielding slave master. I am as gentle as I know how to be with you, Benny, but even you must admit, you are hardly obedient, and frequently impossible to manage. Really, what would you have me do?” he asks, running a hand through his hair. “A fleet requires discipline, and I cannot spend all of my time managing your fits of pique. You’ve put yourself between me and the rest of the crew, Benjamin, and it’s really extraordinarily selfish.”

He then sighs, and waves a hand, as though brushing away his previous words.

“Here. Come out with me on the Parel tomorrow night,” he says. “I’ll show you how to handle her. We can talk some more then.” 

He rises, and beckons for Benny to do so as well. “In the meantime,” he says, “if you don’t want to join me in my quarters, there are other crew bedrooms that I think you’ll find quite comfortable — more so than the accommodations we had for you previously.” He pulls Benny’s head down by the back of his neck for a kiss, which Benny accepts, less reluctantly than he had before. He follows the Old Man’s directions down a different corridor, where he finds his way to the handsome bedroom he’d first awoken in. Something about being back on Paradiso makes the hairs on the back of his neck stand up with some kind of suspicion, or maybe anxiety, but he can’t square why, and he’s too tired to follow up on it. He kicks his boots off and falls into bed, and while it’s not the massive four poster in the Old Man’s stateroom, it’s by far more comfortable than the bench beds on the Batavia, and he falls into dreamless sleep almost as soon as his head hits the pillow. 

—

When the sun sets the next night, they meet with the smallest boat in the fleet, one Benny had only seen from a distance until now. They trade off with the man sailing her, Piotr, who seems grateful to get a chance at some time on Paradiso.  

“I use her mostly for recreation, and as bait in hunts,” the Old Man explains to him as the sun creeps down below the horizon. “She can handle the circumnavigation well enough, but I will say, the voyage isn’t very comfortable.” 

He kicks off his shoes and grins at Benny. “Why bother with propriety when it’s just the two of us?” he says. He trims sail and tacks to port, wind filling out the mainsail, and the Parel picks up a sudden burst of speed abruptly enough to briefly raise the bow out of the water. Benny can feel everything on the small boat. It’s…exhilarating, breathtaking, for all he doesn’t breathe.

“Actually, you sit back, I can handle her myself,” the Old Man calls to him over the sound of the surf. Benny obliges, well out of his element. He braces himself in the one built-in seat on the deck, grabbing the rail for dear life as the Parel skips and weaves through the invisible path of the wind. 

The Old Man tacks again, braced on the deck, bare feet planted solid as a rooted tree, single-handedly holding the line taut as the whole boat tilts so low over the water the jib almost skims the waves. Every muscle in his body is as tense as the line in his hands, all of him fierce in concentration. His face is transfixed with wild delight. It’s the most beautiful Benny’s ever seen him. 

“So you see, there are plenty of things to enjoy about this life,” he shouts, barely audible over the roar of the wind and waves and breathless as though from joyful exertion, “the freedom not least among them.”

Don’t let it get to you, he tries to remind himself, don’t let it pull you under. But he’s not even sure what it is he’s fighting anymore, let alone why. 

“Yeah,” Benny says, in spite of himself. “It’s amazing.”

Later, again on the aft deck of Paradiso , Benny’s staring out at the horizon, watching the light bleed gray into gold at the approaching dawn. He’s feeling oddly light, almost…happy. The Old Man comes up beside him, silent as ever, and slips an arm around his waist. 

“It’s beautiful, isn’t it?” he murmurs, leaning his head against Benny’s shoulder. Benny hums in agreement, rests his chin on the Old Man’s head. He’s the perfect kind of tired, limbs loose and heavy from a night of pleasurable exertion. 

“This is why,” the Old Man says. “For nights like this. It really does make eternity worth it.”

Benny shifts to face him. “Thank you,” he says, and is unsettled to find that he means it. “For tonight.”

The Old Man cups Benny’s face with one hand, rubs his thumb gently over the beard Benny’s grown in the last few weeks. “Of course, my dear,” he replies, “It’s all I want for any of you,” and tilts his head up, catches Benny in a kiss as the sun breaks over the waves. 

“I told you you’d feel better,” he says. “You just needed time.”

“I still need time,” he admits. The Old Man squeezes his hand. 

“That’s okay,” he says. “You’ll get there. I promise.” 

“Come to bed with me,” he implores again, soft and sweet and winsome, and this time, Benny can’t think of a reason not to. 

—

Benny gets two bottles of the doctored wine to take back to the Batavia, and Sorento gets his prisoner. He grits his teeth as Sorento gags the sailor and shoves him into the cage in the head, but says nothing. This task accomplished, Sorento regards Benny sardonically.

“Well done,” he says, and like always, there’s some deeper meaning behind everything he says that Benny can never interpret. “I see you’ve figured out the rules. Whether you survive the game is a different matter.”

Carlos nudges him, and he takes the radio headphones briefly. When he removes them, he looks to Benny again. 

“They’ve sighted the Marquesas,” he says. “The hardest part is over.” 

—

The next three years pass in a blur. 

—

It isn’t until ‘36 that they sight the Florida coast again, and it’s surreal, being back in American waters. The route they take ‘round the world takes more than twice as long as it should, both because they’re in no hurry and, more importantly, because the longer they stay away from any particular port, the less chance they’ll be remembered. Strangely, though, they don’t dock anywhere on the eastern seaboard. Instead, the fleet sails around Florida, and Benny realizes, with a jolt, where they’re headed. They make port in New Orleans, three years since he’d left. 

The Old Man schedules the maintenance he’s got planned for the whole fleet, and gives out everyone’s assignments via radio. Benny and Sorento are chosen to pick targets. He greets them at the part of the marina where they’ve docked the smaller fleet. Benny has a nasty feeling about this.

“You have two days,” the Old Man says as they disembark from the Batavia. “Find me something good.”

“You comin’ with?” he asks Sorento, and gets the typical annoyance in response. He’s come to recognize the different shades of Sorento’s many bad moods.

“I’m not supervising you,” he grumbles. “You’re on your own.” There’s even more bite to his voice than usual, and more meaning than what’s on the surface of his words. Sorento turns and deliberately walks away, leaving Benny alone on the pier. No one will be watching him. There’s nothing stopping him from leaving the city. Or there is. It’s a test, he’s got no illusions about that. He doesn’t know what’ll happen if he does leave, but the Old Man’s expecting him to, no doubt about it. 

Home rolls over him like a weight. He drinks in the heat, the moisture in the air, damp and heavy and still. He can taste electricity in the air, can feel the late-afternoon thunderstorm waiting for its chance to break. It’s been three years, three long, beautiful, glorious, wretched fucking years, and he’s home. He could leave, he knows. Doesn’t know how far he’d get, or what the consequences might be, but he could leave. He could go home, find Marie and try to explain how didn’t leave her and Dot of his own accord, how terribly he missed them, how he longed the whole damn time to find a way back to them. 

The Old Man thinks he won’t do it. That alone infuriates him, makes him want to prove his Father wrong. He’s allowed out by himself, it’s their first port in American waters this whole time and it’s fucking Louisiana, of course it’s a fucking test. He trudges up and down the marina, not even taking in the boats, seething. The Old Man’s so confident Benny’s totally his now, that he’s got no problem letting his dog off the rope, so damn sure Benny’ll come crawling back no matter what. He stands and stares between the marina to one side and the streets of the city on the other. He makes a decision. 

He takes a street car to the train station. Train fare to Lafayette Parish would’ve made him blanche three years ago. He would’ve walked, or hitched, or even freighthopped, but he wouldn’t have paid. Now, money’s no issue, and paying has its benefits, expediency being chief among them. The Old Man’s given him cash to use in the city, which isn’t too unusual, but again makes him suspicious of his Father’s motives. What use does he have for money now? He buys his ticket and hangs around the terminal, avoiding the gaze of every person walks by him, paranoia leading him to see his crewmates’ faces in every stranger. The train arrives. He embarks. 

He doesn’t bother to find a seat, given he’s far too restless to sit. Instead, he stands in the carriage entrance as other passengers push past him, streaming in and out. Eventually an attendant chivvies him into a compartment to keep him out of the way, and he lingers in the doorway, shifting from foot to foot. The train begins to move, the station slowly slipping past as it picks up speed, and he thinks suddenly of the Old Man waiting for him. For a second he’s viciously, viscerally happy imagining his confusion, then concern, then anger. The train leaves the station, and he thinks of Sorento, coming back to pick him up and finding him gone. The city rushes past, faster and faster, until they clear the streets and look out onto rural woods and bayous; it hits him then, just what he’s doing, how he can never go back. If he leaves now, there will be no place for him. He can’t go home; he’s a monster, a murderer. His wife and daughter will want nothing to do with him, especially three years later. He can’t give up the life he has, not for a pale imitation of what he used to have. All of this rushes through him at once, and then he can’t bear it anymore; it feels like he’s tearing his heart out. The Old Man won’t be angry, he knows, just disappointed, sad for him. He’d shown so much potential. He’s throwing it away. 

Without knowing what he’s doing, without feeling anything, he shoves out of the compartment and up to the carriage doors; it’s the work of an instant to rip them free of each other, with how strong he is now. It’s go home or go nowhere, and the answer is obvious. Benny throws himself from the train, tries to roll as he falls and only sort of succeeds, hears alarmed cries from the still accelerating train as his head rings out and still no blood pounds in his chest or his ears or his heart. He lands, and he knows that were he still human, he’d be a whole lot worse off, but on the whole, he’s feeling fine. Grand, even. It’s go home or rip himself to shreds. He dusts himself off, considers the hike it’ll be back to New Orleans. There’s no other choice. All he can do is go home. 

He takes in the yachts when he finally makes it back, and does find a couple decent prospects for targets. Best not to make it obvious he had no intention of doing his job. Sorento meets Benny right where he’d left him on the pier, and he looks at him and seems to take in everything. There’s a look on his face Benny can’t quite read, like he’s relieved, but something else as well. Almost…disappointed.

“It’s good to have you back,” he says. 

“Nowhere else I’d rather be,” Benny answers, not looking at him. 

The Old Man is waiting when they get back to the fleet. Benny gives his report dully, rattles off the name of the yachts he’d picked and the times they’ll be leaving, staring at the ground the whole time. When he’s done, the Old Man pulls him in for a kiss, hands framing, trapping his face. 

“I’m proud of you, Benny,” he whispers. “I knew you would come back to me.”

“Of course, Father,” he says, and he says it sincerely. “I love you,” he quietly adds, to the Old Man's obvious delight.

“We’ll have eternity together,” his Father says. “And as long as you’re with me, you’ll never die.”

Chapter Text

2.

Purgatory

He’s dead. He’s dead, and just like he always knew would happen, he’s in Hell. 

It isn’t what he’s expecting. Oh, he’s expecting Hell, and years of Catechism didn’t lead him wrong, because this is indeed Hellish. It’s still just...not what he was expecting. 

Benny wakes to freezing cold with a violent start. He gasps and grabs for his neck, clutching the awful wound and screaming, until he realizes the skin of his neck’s smooth and whole. He opens his eyes in a forest. The cold is pervasive, and something feels wrong in a way he can’t quite name. Everything’s washed out, like someone bled the color out of the whole world. There are no sounds at all, and maybe that’s a part of the wrongness. It’s what he first finds so disturbing, honestly, this forest with no bird calls or rustling small animals. For a moment, he lies back against the frigid carpet of leaves on the forest floor and Benny’s sure he’s the only thing left in the universe. 

It’s at that moment that something leaps out from a tree and attacks him. 

Instinct propels him to roll to one side, narrowly dodging a barely-human thing, a monster of screaming claws and rage. They land in a crouch and rise at the same time Benny does, spitting leaves and growling. It’s a man, or at least shaped like one, in a ragged suit decades out of the current fashion. The man is babbling, saying something over and over again. He’s stumbling like he’s rabid, cursing anything and everyone. Benny catches a snatch of the curses. The words he hears are ‘fresh meat’ and ‘new blood’ 

He launches himself at Benny again, and Benny stumbles backward, nearly losing his footing on the slippery ground in his haste to back away. He’s not a vampire, near as Benny can tell between how fast the bastard’s moving and the dim gray light of this place. Yeah, his teeth look sharp, but his hands are clawed and his eyes — or really, his whole face — is strangely animalistic. It doesn’t really matter what he is though, because he’s still coming at Benny with claws outstretched, snarling. Benny backs away until he hits a tree, feels the bark rough against his palms. Truth be told, he’s never been much of a fighter. Never had to be. As a human, everybody except short drunks respected his size, and after that, well. Like Isaak said, that was never why the Old Man kept him around. 

The man goes for his face and Benny swings out, tries to hit first. His wrist jars angrily as the other man catches it, and it’s not fucking fair that he can still be hurt when he’s dead. He shoves forward, tries to get his arms around the man’s throat, and the movement carries them both back down. His teeth extend reflexively as they roll, snapping at each other’s faces in the dirt. He gets an arm around his enemy and wonders if he can die when he’s already in Hell, squeezes tight and grunts as punches, kicks, and clawing wounds still land. He’s the stronger however, or at least the larger, and with a desperate, furious jerk of his elbow, he snaps the man’s neck. It kills him. Small mercies, maybe. He scrambles to his feet, eyes darting in every direction, bracing for another attack. Minutes pass. Nothing comes. He can’t imagine that means he’s safe. 

He rolls the body over, checks for anything useful. The man’s carrying no money, not that Benny can imagine any possible use for it here anyway, and nothing else of value save a long-bladed knife made entirely of bone. He wonders why the man didn’t use it. He takes the knife, and the man’s coat. He briefly wonders if he should bury the body, and feels guilty at how vehemently his whole being balks at the thought of taking the time to do so. Instead, Benny picks a direction at random and tries to put as much distance between himself and the corpse as possible, in case the man has friends lying in wait. 

If he stops for even a moment all of this will come crashing down on him, every memory he’s trying really fucking hard not to let rise to the surface of his thoughts. Everything is strange and wrong, cold and gray and not quite real, but beneath that, an ocean of horror waits for high tide to roll in and drown him. If he stops at all, he’ll remember knees on his chest and many hands pinning him down and hot blood spattering on his face and the sudden agony of the teeth of a saw in his neck. If he allows himself to know any of this, he’ll remember who held the saw, who knelt on his sternum, whose blood he tasted in his mouth and tried in vain to blink out of his eyes in the seconds and minutes before. He’ll remember that it took agonizing minutes of slow sawing to die. He’ll remember the sound he made when he tried to scream through a cut throat and half-severed spinal cord. 

You let her die, you let her die, she’s dead because of you , a cruel voice whispers in his head over and over again. He doesn’t try to ignore it; it’s true. What kind of a man are you? the voice mocks, that reminds him how fucking stupid he was to think he could ever escape it. He flees through the woods, as if he can escape it now, staggering onward through the gray and empty woods. It’s just as futile here. 

He can hear his ragged breathing. He clutches a stitch in his side that might just be in his head, seeing as how his breathing’s all false and he’s dead anyway. It doesn’t matter. It still hurts. Step after step after step he trudges, flinching every time he thinks he hears a twig snap, waiting for something else to attack. He wishes for water. He doesn’t, for whatever reason, wish for blood. The forest is dry and dark. He feels empty, just like the world all around him. Every other breath reminds him of the saw, and yet, he doesn’t stop. 

Cold. Cold, cold wind that cuts through his clothes, the same he’d been wearing at the time of his death, for some reason not stained with his blood. Odd, as it’s perfectly able to soak up the blood of the wounds his attacker dealt him, or that man’s blood in turn. He pulls his coat tighter around his shoulders and is glad, distantly, that it’s wool. 

He hikes through the woods; he doesn’t know how long. Furtive and hunted, he hides from any sharp noises and fights other monstrous men in a half-crazed panic when hiding’s no use, until he physically can’t anymore and all but collapses. He wants to sleep where he falls, and realizes just then that even dead, he still must sleep. He can’t just lie here though; he’s not safe yet. He’s not safe at all, and maybe he never will be. He forces himself up off the ground, and miserably drags himself another quarter mile at least, scouting with increasing hopelessness for something, anything that looks like shelter. Eventually, he finds a tree, gray and dour, empty branches like claws clutching at the sky. There’s a hollow in the bottom, and for a moment he almost crumples looking at it, the way it could be any half-dead cypress from a thousand childhood games of hide-and-go-seek, long gone a lifetime ago. He pulls himself partway together, drags fallen branches and uprooted thorn bushes in front of the hollow and crawls inside. It’s pitch dark and freezing, but it’s empty and quiet, and for just a second, just a minute, he lets himself breathe out. 

He doesn’t know how long it’s been, only that the gray light has faded into true, pitch-dark night. There are no sounds. He’s sitting with his knees pulled up to his chest like a child, and it takes another minute or so of coming out of it to realize he’s rocking back and forth, has been for a while. He hasn’t been breathing for a while, and when he does take a shallow breath, the air is painfully cold in his lungs and he breathes out and doesn’t breathe back in again. Funny, it’s not often he genuinely doesn’t breathe. He doesn’t need to, but the body remembers. 

His arms are wrapped around his knees; his left hand is clutching his right so hard his knuckles are white, and when he tries to unclench them his fingers seize up for a second and don’t respond. It’s only for a moment, but when he manages to remember how to move his fingers properly they’re still stiff with cold and muscle tension and flex with aching slowness. 

He hasn’t been asleep any of this time, just staring into space, really, but he nevertheless doesn’t remember anything between dragging himself inside his makeshift shelter and blinking back into reality a minute ago. It feels almost like waking out of his nightmares, or, back when he still belonged to the Old Man, closing his eyes and enduring a punishment, trying to go somewhere else in his mind while it happened. Unfortunately just the thought of either of these things sends Andrea’s bleeding, tear-stained face back into his vision when he closes his eyes. He shakes his head, as though he could dispel the horror that way. It doesn’t work. 

It’s not fair , he thinks. He’s dead, in Hell. Why is he still forced to be alone with his worst memories?

He isn’t hungry, which is a surprise. The constant, low-level ache of never quite drinking his fill that he had come to get used to and tune out when he was trying out his experiment in clean living is gone, though in its place is a strange numbness, a disconnect from his body. His senses all feel dull somehow, like he’s drugged, or wrapped in cotton wool. He’d compare it to the Old Man’s smoothing out the edges, but that, at least, felt nice. Here, it’s like a fog he has to struggle through to find the most basic thoughts. 

He wants a fire. There’s kindling twigs and dry branches aplenty, and it’s no work at all to gather enough to form a bed. His fire starter is, by some chance, in his pocket, as he always kept it before. It’s still unknowable minutes of dashing his freezing fingers against the flint before he manages to catch and keep a spark on the felt, but he could weep with relief with the kindling catches alight. The sputtering, sullen little blaze transfixes him. It’s useful for neither heat nor light, but something in him guards it as though the flames are the only thing keeping him alive. He needs this fire. He breathes in its direction like he’s pouring life itself, so terribly gently, into it, against the nature of this place. 

Out of an instinct so old he’d nearly forgotten it entirely, he rummages inside the pocket of his coat, searching for the little black book that he realizes as soon as he reaches for it, is long gone. Ridiculous urge. The saint suaire wouldn’t have spared him. Not from Hell. But he’d have liked to read the prayers inside it nonetheless. In his head, he recites a French rosary, to calm himself. Not aloud, as he doesn’t dare breathe out and risk disturbing his fire. He prays and prays and prays, lets the words blur into a seamless mechanical rhythm until he realizes, after some time, that he’s lost count of the decades. Out of nowhere, a violent shudder rocks through him, and for a moment he bitterly thinks I don’t deserve this. But of course he does. He’s a vampire. A murderer and a pirate. And a sinner in other ways as well. He deserves this. He deserves — an eternity of this? Of the cold fierce wind and bloody teeth of other monsters? Eternity, and with no inkling of what will happen if he dies somehow again here. It’s unfathomable. Even contemplating spending forever frozen at the age he was turned on the Old Man’s crew, it hadn’t seemed the same. He and Andrea both knew she’d age while he didn’t. They’d both put off properly discussing it, but neither of them were ignorant of that looming reality. It doesn’t matter now, for either of them. But in both scenarios, he’d been alive, or at least as alive as a vampire could be. Horror wars with numb apathy as the words eternal damnation chase each other around the inside of his skull. There is nothing left. He has received his final reward, and the only consolation available to him is that Dante was right about Hell being cold. He hugs himself, lets out a ragged breath — and, cruel joke that his entire damned existence is, the tiny, persistent, beloved flame winks out. 

For a moment he can only stare in distraught shock at the wisp of smoke and a single glowing point against his vision where the fire had been, and then he can’t stop himself. He weeps for it, a child lost in the dark. 

—

He’s long since stopped tracking the days as they bleed into weeks, then probably years. It’s all gray down here, all dull. You can tell the difference between day and night, sort of. It’s just difficult to imagine why anyone’d care to. The longer he’s here, the fewer other monsters try to come for him. He wonders why, but not enough to try to figure it out. There’s a lot of things he wonders, and can’t find the mental strength to look for. This place saps his strength, drains him out. He feels hollow, full of fog, and too cold. It’s not the Hell he thought he could expect. It’s worse. 

If he’d missed the sea before, it was nothing like to now. The air is gritty with dust, the water in what few streams exist is foul, and the trees choke each other for a taste of the weak sun and reach desiccated hands like dying claws to a sky he can hardly see. It’s odd to think he’d rather be bound to a rack over a fire somewhere. Honestly, were it the case, he’d most certainly beg to be back here, but at least a torturer would be someone to talk to. 

He always means to try to find any of his old fallen crewmates, or anyone who knows of the Old Man, but somehow finding the will to go looking is always just beyond him. It’s easier to wander than to wonder, easier to just keep moving and question none of it. The cold sinks into his bones and despair comes easy. Not once has he had any idea where to go in this place, only the knowledge that to stop moving, to truly rest beyond the few moments of stolen shuteye snatched between the near constant attacks, would be to suffer a far worse fate than even the death that landed him in Hell to begin with. If he lets himself stop, he’s afraid he’ll crumble into dust. It’s easy to let instinct take over, easy to act like an animal when everyone else is acting like it too.

Once, he caught the scent of something foul, sulphurous, before he was set upon by a pack of dogs he couldn't see. They had chased him for three days and three nights, baying like the trumpets of fucking Armageddon and snapping vicious-sounding jaws at neck height. He’d crossed open meadows, if dead grassland can be called such, and putrid still ponds, and still the hounds gave chase. He thinks they probably could’ve caught him easily if the beasts had so chosen, as at one point he stumbled and collapsed for minutes, and the baying subsided to soft eager whimpers and deep growls. Eventually, the beasts must have grown bored with him, because they’d peeled off from the chase to go terrorize some other poor fuck, and he’d wondered, deliriously, if that was how the hounds of Hell made sport.

There are creatures in this haunted forest a Hell of a lot weirder than him. In all his years sailing with a crew of vampires, he’d never learned much about all the other not-human things that apparently live in the world, all of whom, when they die, seem to go to this Hell. A fair few of them look human enough, at least from a distance. Some of them are mongrels, creatures with humanish faces and warped, twisted bodies. Some of the things he sees don’t even bother pretending to be anything other than animal, cursed, twisted, designed by a cruel hand for killing. There are folks who look like humans in every respect, but feed exclusively on corpses. There are those who can peel off their own skin, revealing others’ faces underneath, the twin of the person whose face they stole. There are werewolves and wraiths and rugarus and loup garous, though surprisingly few vampires. There are also things far more dread and terrible lurking at the edges of the forest, at the corner of the eye. If these creatures have names, no one he’s ever spoken to knows them. The darker things, he tries his best to avoid, and prays never to meet one, for all the good it may do. 

Not many people are ever willing or able to stop for a chat, but over time the impression he gets confirms what he’d suspected while alive: his kind are a dying breed. Rarely, it seems, do any of the monsters in Hell die of old age or disease. Fewer still are killed by their own kind, like he was. For the most part, every person, animal, and thing in-between he’s come across was killed by a human, by a hunter. It’s odd. He’d never much credited that groups of humans, no matter how well-educated or armed, would stand much of a chance against monsters like him, and yet. On the rare occasion that he meets someone who doesn’t just want to kill him, they all have some variation on the same story. Rough men with Bibles, salt, and guns smoking out nests and carving up bodies, burning whole monster families, razing entire communities to the ground. Evidently, the hunters are a far more dangerous problem on land than the Old Man ever cared to admit. It wouldn’t have been out of character for him. After all, it didn’t affect him, safe at sea, so why should he care for the welfare of his brethren? That, and the fact that his maker never did care to admit that anything or anyone could possibly threaten him.

He considers the state of the vamps he does find. What few there are are usually confused, vulnerable. Most of them have been turned relatively recently, and don’t tend to come from strong nests. They also don’t tend to last long. If vampires are so rare in the living world, perhaps it’s because they die so young, so soon after their first death. 

Once, he practically stumbles over a girl — or at least, he thinks it’s a girl — crawling on all fours across the soil. The child has gaunt, empty holes for eyes and three vicious rings of shark-like teeth inside her gaping mouth. She’s also frightfully young, and obviously dying. He regards the girl, hissing in speechless agony, still crawling helplessly away from him, and his heart twists, thinking of Dot. From the look of her, she’s clearly starving. He holds out a hand toward her, like she’s a stray kitten or something, and the girl cocks her head sightlessly and inhales a rattling breath. He thinks she’s smelling him. 

“Here, c’mere,” he whispers, unsure if she can hear him. It takes what feels like an hour, crouching near her, before she crawls close enough to him to allow him to pet the top of her head. He has no idea how to help her. He sits like that, with the little monster girl, somehow dying while already dead, until whatever end it is this place brings with it claims her. She’s dead by sunup. Somewhere deep inside him, something is screaming, but none of it touches him. He’s an ocean of aching numbness as he digs a small hole in the compacted, lifeless earth and buries the little corpse. When he’s done, he sits heavily back in the dirt, leaning curled into himself against a gnarled tree. The things he’s done, even the things he’s allowed to happen without stopping, he knows they’re unforgivable. But a child whose only crime was physical ugliness and a hunger beyond her control, why would God condemn her? What kind of God would sanction a monster child’s birth, if she were only going to die and then die again in Hell? 

Everyone here might be a monster, but not every monster is of the human kind. They don’t all seem to deserve it, but how else is he to reconcile their presence here? Everything he’s ever known, everything he’s ever been taught spoke of Hell, and where else could he have expected to go? But that doesn’t account for the children. Monster children , an almost unfathomable thought in itself. Of course, it makes sense. The Old Man was already unscrupulously evil, it’s not difficult to imagine the type of man who’d turn a child into an immortal pet, nor the type to kill once bored of his creation. But most of the children running feral and wild and full of sick despair in Hell aren’t even vampires. Some of the other monsters can breed. That implies they existed naturally, and if that’s the case, then are they just the monsters, the species, who’ve done aught to deserve this place? But then again, how can children go to Hell? Are they all merely unbaptized, as Dante posited? ‘Round and around these thoughts chase him, and he slides deeper and deeper into despondency. 

Hell is nothing like he ever expected, and yet it serves its purpose. Benny has nothing but time on his hands, and the forest is well-suited to remorseful contemplation of his sins. He’d known for years he was damned. Suspected it, feared it, even before the Old Man turned him. He was an adulterer long before he was a murderer. They’re both mortal sins, though Benny can’t quite bring himself to accept they’re actually of the same caliber of evil. He broke his covenant with Marie, damaged his soul and rarely bothered looking back. All he can hope is that his actions haven’t damned her as well. He’d always suspected Hell was waiting for him, it’s just that he hadn't cared. What was eternity compared to the immediacy of his desires? He knows exactly what sins brought him here, long before he ever added piracy, murder, cannibalism to the list. The problem was always the docks.

It’s here, in the cold loneliness, with no one to hear him and no one to lie to, that it comes back to him, the thing he’s refused to acknowledge all these years. There’s no one to lie to. No room for anything but honesty. Nothing but time to admit to himself that most hateful, damning truth: that he never really loved her. He never loved Marie, never really tried, and that’s why it’s all his fault. None of this, none of any of this, would’ve happened if he hadn’t decided to go back to the docks. 

That’s the root of it. Having more than enough time now to reflect on all the bad choices that might have led him here, what he had at first assumed was a paradox had nagged at him. There were no good choices. He didn’t ask to be remade into a monster. What was he supposed to do? Commit yet another mortal sin, felo de se , or murder others to consume them? Refuse to eat, assuming the Old Man would even allow a hunger strike, and wither to an agonized, starving husk? Wouldn’t that still be a suicide? If there were a clear answer, then at least it would be a test he had failed, hadn’t the strength and piety to withstand. But if there ever was a correct moral action, he couldn’t see it then, though he’s beginning to now. Hell has brought clarity he never let himself find in life. He knew his sins then; he just wasn’t sure what else he was ever expected to do. But here, now, with nothing left, he digs down into that fundamental lie, the lie he’s told himself for decades now: that he didn’t have a choice. Of course there was no work in New Orleans other than the trade. Hadn’t he, on some level, known that? The truth is, he went to the docks because he wanted the docks. He went to the docks because he’d missed it.

They never fought. He never beat Marie, neither of them ever hit Dot beyond the occasional swat on the bottom. They weren’t desperately unhappy, beyond the grinding misery of poverty and hunger. They just weren’t... happy , either. They’d married for convenience and money’s sake, and little else. For a few years or so after they’d married, before Dot came along, they’d begun to notice the pitying whispers from other townsfolk, wondering if Marie was barren, with how long it was taking to conceive, but the truth was they just...didn’t make love, much. He’s not gonna pretend that wasn’t mostly his fault. He’d enjoyed the docks before he married Marie, and resented his vow of fidelity. As a teen-ager he’d spent anxious nights wondering if he was wholly bent, to the point of broken, but experience — Andrea, especially — has taught him otherwise. He likes women just fine, just not the one he’d married. But what does that matter? His monstrosity did no good to the woman he'd actually loved, either.

He was young then, and irresponsible. It took not only Dot, but the Depression to get him to wake up, and by then there was so little food and so little money he’d been more than willing to believe that he’d had no other options. He’d convinced himself he had no choice, that he wouldn’t have returned to the trade if there’d been any other jobs, but he’s finally beginning to realize just how excellent a confidence man he is when the mark is his own better judgement. 

It’s an age of this self-flagellation before he accepts that it doesn’t matter if he repents or not, though. There’s no getting out of this. 

—

Half the people in this place are too far gone to even reason with. Most of them, maybe. The cold and the loneliness and the endless, dragging emptiness take everything after a while. He knows it well enough. He can feel it happening to him too. Bleed out all the life, what’s left of any of them other than the wanting? The running, the fighting, it feels good, it feels right, as close as he can get to feeling alive again, as thin and false as that feeling is. It doesn’t surprise him at all that it’s the only thing driving the worst off down here. Sooner or later, he too will be just another hungry ghost, and then one day, he’ll be less than dead. 

Time passes.

It’s maybe a decade, maybe two, since he died and first awoke in Hell. He runs and fights until he can’t anymore, and then he hides and sleeps until restlessness drives him out from whatever hole he’s found, and then he runs and fights some more. Nothing changes, day in and day out, until the day he wakes to a knife at his throat. 

He’d been running flat out for days, chased by a pack of misshapen, bear-like creatures that shift into humans and back again. He’d finally given them the slip, and found a cave, barely more than a shallow gap between a cluster of boulders, and crashed, exhausted, into blessedly deep sleep. He’s dead to the world, so to speak, until the touch of something cold and sharp to the skin of his neck jerks him awake as though the blade were already sawing through his flesh, like he’s got to be dragged through the memory of his death in order to grasp at consciousness again. 

“Wake up, evil spirit, wake up,” a quavering voice hisses above him. He stills, forcing down the wave of feral rage and terror, the urge to bite and claw and kill. Vulnerable like this, his chances of killing whoever it is before they slice his throat to bleeding ribbons are next to nothing. He clenches his fists and breathes slowly, reigns in the mindless monster and opens his eyes. 

The knife pressed against his jugular is nothing but a jagged, rusty strip of metal, one end wrapped in scraps of cloth. The man holding it looks human, but that doesn’t mean anything. Many of the folks in Hell do. He’s short, light brown in coloring, and comparatively tidy by the standards of the Woods. The beard he keeps is neat enough, as neat as it’s possible to keep, his long hair tied back with a bit of string, and while his clothes are as ragged as anybody’s, the bigger holes, Benny notices, are patched and darned. He can’t imagine why anyone would bother. He looks like he’s still clutching tight to humanity. He’s aware that the man hasn’t killed him yet. It would’ve been easy enough while he was asleep. He takes a chance.

“Can I sit up?” he rasps, and notices that his voice hurts, and quivers almost as much as his attacker’s. He can’t remember the last time he talked to someone else. The man narrows his eyes, but nods, and sits back far enough to allow Benny to roll to his side and push himself to sitting. As he does, the man scuttles backward even farther away from him, still gesturing threateningly with the knife. 

“Are you a bloodsucker, beast?” the man asks, accusatorily, and now Benny notices the bug-eyed intensity to the fellow. “I think you must be,” he says, before Benny can answer. “My apologies for the somniatory assault, though as you must agree, I am wise to strike first and preempt the risk!

He moves as if to shake hands, but as Benny follows the motion and reaches his own hand out, he jerks away, shaking his head and sneering. He raises his hand, palm up, and a mean-looking spike of something like bone slides from the skin of his wrist. 

“Ah, ah,” he taunts, wagging his finger, parallel to the spike. “I have no need for it down in this dungeon, with no hunger to pain and torment me, but I’m not so completely without weapons, now am I?” he taunts. Benny pulls his hands back, keeps them raised as nonthreateningly as he knows how. 

“What can I help you with, friend?” he asks, the words heavy and strange on his tongue. 

“What indeed,” the strange man laughs, “in this damned forest who can help, especially among the delirious dead?”

He pauses expectantly, as though the question weren’t rhetorical and he wants Benny to respond, but when Benny opens his mouth, not sure what to say, the man cuts him off yet again and continues. 

“How fortuitous that you name me friend! They are scarce in this forest, and I keenly feel the lack. You, now,” he rambles happily, the light in his eyes bordering on crazed, “you are not yet mad like all the others.” He grins and shows all his broken teeth. “I can tell. You are the only man here even close to as sane as I am!” 

He leans in close, covers his mouth with the hand the bone is protruding from, as though anyone could be around to eavesdrop, and whispers, “I have a proposition for you, vampire.”

Benny stares at him, bemused. “I’m listening,” he says.

“You are fast and strong and have your tearing biting teeth, but there are many more of your kind here, and many worse things too. No one comes to match strength with me when they could battle you!”

“Alright,” he says. “True enough, I guess. So what?”

“So, as two men of reason, we should ally ourselves, for better protection against all the dark beings of these woods.”

“...who are you?” he asks, genuinely at a loss. The man gives a flourishing little bow from where he sits, and Benny supposes the danger’s now passed. 

“My name is Virgil. In life, when not occupied consuming the brains of my enemies, I was a philosopher and scholar of some note.”

“...uh huh.” Somehow, he doubts that. If this fellow were a philosopher of any kind, it wasn’t in a professional capacity. The ‘standing on a soapbox in the town square’ variety, more like. 

“And to what moniker do you answer, friend?” the man called Virgil asks him. He gives his name, easily. There’s no point in lying down here. 

“Benjamin,” Virgil says with no small relish, “Hebrew, Son of the Right Hand.” Benny grimaces. “Just Benny,” he corrects. 

“Pet names are the ambit of the parochial-minded,” Virgil sniffs. Benny grits his teeth. He must notice, because he hurriedly continues, “Well, just Benny ,” and if he says it with disdain, at least he says it, “do you wish to ask me my purpose, the reason we have to chance upon each other in this foul woodland?”

He’s truly just incredibly annoying. Benny grunts noncommittally and nods for him to go on. There’s likely no stopping him anyway. 

“I am on a pilgrimage, my friend, one upon which you may accompany me if you so choose, provided that you do not betray in my sleep and murder me.” 

Benny’s not sure how Virgil plans to prevent him from doing this, but he keeps this thought to himself. Virgil is most definitely a madman, but not the kind that gets made down here. No, this fellow’d clearly come by it honest, though Benny can’t imagine being dead has improved things any. 

“A pilgrimage through Hell, huh?” he asks, the irony not lost on him. Virgil smiles slyly at him and cocks his head, an oddly uncanny gesture.

“Oh, but we’re not in hell , are we?” he replies, giggling at his own apparent cleverness. 

Benny looks around, like he’s all in awe. “Funny, Heaven looks a sure sight different than what I expected!” he says sarcastically. Virgil laughs at him. 

“Oh, don’t misinterpret me, my fanged friend,” he says. “We aren’t in heaven either. They don’t reserve that for the likes of us , no. Where we are is wholly other.”

He’s getting impatient. “Enlighten me then, Old Man,” he snaps, and inwardly cringes at the words, both in remembrance of old punishments for taking the wrong tone, and then at the fact that for just a moment, he’d been so far away. 

Virgil doesn’t notice any of that. If anything, he looks even more smugly amused. “Some might call it a heaven, I suppose. A heaven made for all the monsters. But most, those who know the true name of this place, they translate it to Purgatory .” He says it with relish, and strangely, the words send a shiver through Benny. 

“That’s not what Purgatory means,” he says, but doubtfully. Virgil nods, as if to grant him the point. 

“True enough. I suppose you’ve had a proper catechism, then. But whether the most devout of biblical scholars know it or not, this is Purgatory, in all her glory. The Church, my good man, has led us all wrong. Purgatory is the final reward for all monsters, both those like myself, who were born to it, and those like you, who were made.”

That, now. That can’t be true. It’s ridiculous. It’s like nothing he’s ever even heard of, and not that he’s any kind of biblical scholar , but he’s had more than enough schooling and historical study during his years with the Old Man, and yes, catechism before that, to recognize a load of horseshit when it’s dumped in his lap. He used to debate the Old Man about theology, when he was in indulgent enough spirits, and it’s certainly not any kind of Protestant teaching. It’s nothing like Andrea’s Orthodox beliefs either. 

“That’s a fascinating story, I’ll give you that,” he says reluctantly. “But why on Earth should I believe you?”

Virgil shrugs. “Believe or do not,” he says. “It is no concern of mine, so long as you are willing to aid me in my quest.”

“You’re mad. This whole damn place is mad. Hard to believe any of this is God’s will.” 

“This place is made to drive us mad, true enough. It’s a punishment for our monstrosity. But it is not of God’s will, oh no. There are other, worse things than God in this universe, and we are all, man, monster, devil, and divinity, at their mercy.” How does he know this shit? What philosophy did he swallow back when he was alive? Granted, Virgil seems like the type to tell tales just on his own, but nothing about the afterlife is what Benny’d been taught, especially not Purgatory as an afterlife for monsters. 

Virgil rubs his chin morosely. “Aye, in truth, I am weak,” he continues. “I’ve wandered long here, and I can feel my own brains begin to pull away from me as though a wraith like myself were sucking them.” At least he’s honest with himself about it, Benny thinks, though he chides himself for the cruel thought. 

“We all go mad here in the end,” Virgil sighs. “It is the only true surety.”

“Yeah,” Benny says heavily. “I know.”

“It is pointless to hope that our circumstances will ever improve within Purgatory,” Virgil says.

“Well then,” Benny says, still uncertain, and tired of the back and forth, “what’s the point of your ‘pilgrimage’, then? What do you want? What could you possibly even find?”

Virgil stares into him, eyes gleaming flat and haunted in the low grey light of evening in the woods. In Purgatory. He smiles, not reassuringly. 

“What could anyone want of this forest?” he asks, and pauses for effect before he answers. “A way out.”

There’s a hole in reality, somewhere out beyond the forest, Virgil explains. It comes and goes, sometimes big and easy to find, other times so small it’s almost unnoticeable, but always it remains, in some shape or other. God doesn’t make mistakes, but apparently He accounts for the mistakes of others within the hierarchy of Heaven, at least according to Benny’s irritating new friend. The portal exists to allow the righteous, the human , the opportunity to return to the land of the living, if somehow a man were to find himself here by mistake. Virgil says this accounts for the Catholic understanding of Purgatory, from people who crawled back out of this forest and lived again to tell the tale. Benny’s still not sure he believes the man or not, but beggars can’t be choosers. As to whether he deserves a second chance at life, after decades of this, he’s not sure he cares. Hell would be better than this creeping numbness, he’s sure. 

“Alright, then,” he agrees. “I’ll come with you. But you have to explain how the Hell you even plan on finding this so-called portal, or what to do with it.”

“Oh, we can’t find the portal first,” Virgil says carelessly. “It would be useless to us right now.”

“Then what the fuck are we even doing?” he growls. 

His new traveling companion beams at him, his whole face lit up with frenzied light. “We must find the ones who know the spell,” he says. “I refer, naturally, to the dragons.” 

He can’t tell at all if Virgil’s serious. Virgil explains some more, through the rest of the day and long into the night. He is, in fact. Deadly serious. 

—

He figures it’s been a few decades, still working on the maybe foolish assumption that time works that way, or works at all, down here. Virgil remains difficult company, but company nonetheless, and the years have made him care. Searching for the dragons, as futile as it probably is, gives him a purpose that he’s been sorely lacking. Purgatory pulls at him like miles of chilling ocean beneath a raft of corpses. Keeping his head above water is a constant struggle. Touched though he may be, Virgil’s at least someone to talk to, and it’s not enough — he’s well aware it’s not enough — but it reminds him there’s a world to get back to. 

That said, he has pretty severe doubts that Virgil knows how to track a dragon. A lot of their hunting consists of him examining trees and rocks for evidence even Benny can tell exists entirely in his head. They’ve crisscrossed hundreds of miles of barren, featureless woodland, frequently doubling back on a whim. He’s aware, at some level, that their quest is more about staving off madness than accomplishing anything. It’s just that he can’t let himself acknowledge that openly without defeating the purpose of doing this. He especially can never express this to Virgil, who, even however many years later, is still completely sincere. 

The other trouble with Purgatory is it’s just boring. It’s miserable and cold and numb and cruel, but on top of everything else, it’s boring. When they aren’t fighting for their survival here, there’s nothing much to do, and honestly, that’s probably what it is that truly drives men mad in the Woods. The two of them get what mutual entertainment they can from a familiar, inexhaustible source: arguing philosophy. It’s not too painful a kind of familiar, and Virgil is easy to rile and endlessly funny when his blood’s up about God. 

“You used to care more about blasphemy,” he says, on one of the interminable, identical grey days. He’s mostly teasing, and his friend, if he can call Virgil that, heaves a dramatic sigh. “Once I was far more pious a man, but time and wear in this wretched prison have weakened me,” he replies sourly. 

“Now, somehow I doubt that,” Benny says dryly. 

“We were put on Earth by a wrathful God to suffer — ” he continues, but Benny knows this rant by now, and interrupts, “Yes, as a test! To exercise free will! To earn salvation!” he laughs. He likes arguing with Virgil, if for no other reason that it works his friend right up. There’s nothing else to do down here. He doesn’t necessarily believe that, but it helps, probably. He can use all the spiritual encouragement he can get. 

“Regardless,” Virgil grumbles, not to be deterred, “while we may have our differences in theological interpretation, clearly we have neither one of us the moral fortitude to accept our roles in the Almighty’s Great Plan. Or is attempting to abscond from Purgatory like thieves in the night somehow not an act of rebellion in your mind?”

Virgil’s got a point there. He’s no expert, but Benny wouldn’t guess that God would approve of defying His will so blatantly. That’s all of course assuming that any part of his scheme is based in reality, an assumption of which he’s never been entirely convinced. 

“On the other hand, if it truly were forbidden, surely it wouldn’t be possible?” he counters. “Either way, you’re to blame if we catch any kind of Heavenly Hell for it, considerin’ this whole scheme was your idea. I was doing what I was supposed to, before you got to me.”

“I am still far more worthy of a chance at redemption than you,” Virgil says, still irritable. He casts a disdainful sidelong glance at Benny. “Though that is hardly a feat by itself.” 

Benny asks, “And why’s that?” Virgil tries often to get under his skin, but he’s got no skill at it, even now. It’s rare he merits real offense over anything he says. Virgil opens his mouth, probably to say something he thinks would be wounding, but apparently thinks better of it. 

“You lack discipline, and you’re a worse sinner than I,” he says instead, but affectionately, or at least as affectionate as Virgil gets. 

“Oh yeah,” Benny shoots back, still prodding at him, “how so?” It’s not like he doesn’t know the answer. 

“I am not a sodomite,” Virgil says archly. “For that matter, your deviant nature could very well be driving the dragon away.” At that, Benny rolls his eyes. It’s true, but Virgil can’t hurt him. He hasn’t the teeth for it, so to speak. Virgil’s got nothing on the inside of his own head. He’s already been damned, cursed for his infidelity and queer desires, it’s not like God’s prize fool can make him feel any worse . 

“You’re still gonna insist that fuckin’ men is worse than stealin’ from a church, go right ahead,” he says, “but we both know you’re talkin’ out your ass.” Virgil also for some reason hates when Benny uses slang too heavily, so he makes sure he does it frequently. Honestly, a lot of Virgil’s pet peeves might bother him more if he were any kind of a threat, but that’s the opposite of what he is. And every time Benny talks back and gets nothing but impotent and theatrical grumbling for his trouble, something inside him releases, just a little. Maybe that’s why he’s stuck around so long.

Virgil rises, fastidiously dusting off his shabby trousers. “Nevertheless, I tire of suffering for a God who will not show His face,” he sniffs. Benny goes to follow him but stops for a second to look back behind them, idly checking for any threats. By the time he looks ahead again Virgil’s already flouncing away, nose in the air. He can’t say he disagrees. He tries not to dwell on it, though. 

Eventually though, their luck has to run out. 

It’s one night like any other night when it happens. They’re ambushed. Virgil’s in one of his agitated moods, has been for a while now. He’s been talking, loudly and openly, for probably two miles, conversationally cursing God in a voice that carries enough to invite all of Purgatory to respond. Assuming the Heavenly Father is even listening, it must be that after all this time, he’s had enough of the man’s bluster. Benny wonders, all too frequently, about God’s sense of humor. He’s never in all his years doubted that He has one. 

He notes that they’re being followed, but at first he isn’t too concerned. Lots of things watch from a distance before they decide to attack or not. Benny and Virgil are by no means the fiercest creatures in Purgatory, but together they don’t look like so easy a target. At first he notes just one, and whoever it is isn’t trying hard to keep from being spotted, what with all the noise they’re making. He ignores it. It isn’t until maybe half an hour later that a twig snaps and he catches a flash of movement from the other side out of the corner of his eye, and that does get his attention. 

He scans the tree line, knowing he’s unlikely to see much, and without looking, taps Virgil on the shoulder, trying to get him to shut up and pay attention. It’s equally unlikely, but it would be stupid not to try. Virgil indeed doesn’t shut up, just yammers on more pissed-off blasphemy, none of which Benny has time for. 

“Shush, I’m tryin’ to listen for more of them,” he orders, and holds up a hand in warning. Virgil bats at it.

“You can’t tell me what to do,” he answers mulishly. 

“I can when you’re about to get us killed,” he hisses. 

Two shapes creep closer out of the scrub and into sight. From the half-peeled gore crusting both faces, they’re shapeshifters, or something in that vein. As far as he knows, they’re just human, barring the fact that they can peel their skin off and steal someone else’s. They’re inching closer, and neither has said a word yet, which is probably a bad sign. If they wanted something concrete, they would’ve said so already. These ones are just playing with their food. 

There’s a cluster of house-sized boulders some twenty yards beyond the two men. He grips Virgil’s arm briefly, tries to steer them both in that direction. He backs away, and the two creep forward, but he keeps his hand lightly on the knife in his belt and though they follow, they do so at a distance. He manages to put a little distance between them, and it seems like they’ll be able to turn tail once they get to the rocks, when out of nowhere a third man appears to his right, and to his sudden horror, he realizes he’s allowed the shapeshifters to back them into a corner. 

“Surprise,” comes like a swift shock to the heart from above, and one more jumps out of the trees. 

They haven’t got much in the way of strength, but everyone here either gets good at fighting or doesn’t last long. Like everything else ends up sooner or later, they’re killing just for the sake of killing. They shouldn’t have been a threat, but there’s four of them, Virgil’s useless, and Benny wasn’t expecting trouble. These ones at least, aren’t beyond speech, but it doesn’t matter. There’s no reasoning with them, and Benny doesn’t waste time or breath trying. He lunges at the nearest man, and maybe this one wasn’t expecting him to be fast, because it’s no trouble to sink his teeth into the man’s neck and tear until flesh rips away. He tastes blood, and maybe it holds no true power over him here, but it’s exhilarating nonetheless, the closest thing there is in Purgatory to feeling anything at all. 

There’s a furious snarl from one of the others, who lashes out at Benny with a jerry-rigged spear and he’s quick enough to gouge a chunk out of Benny’s thigh, but the pain only angers the animal in him. He drags the man forward by the spear he won’t let go of and catches him by the throat, and curses in German spill from his lips alongside wolfish snarls. Benny laughs. 

He can only keep half an eye on Virgil, flitting in-between the fighters. Virgil’s panicking, swiping at the men with the bone shard in his wrist like it’d do any good at all, jumping anxiously from foot to foot. The last of them is quick, and gets behind him, catches him by the wrist and snaps the shard like a twig. Virgil screams, and at the sound, sudden and awful, Benny turns and too late sees one of the creatures grab Virgil by the head and twist ‘til a crack rings out and Benny’s only friend collapses like a puppet with its strings cut. The world fractures. 

What kind of a man are you?

In a second Benny abandons the shapeshifter he’s grappling with, kicks him in the head, and sprints to the thing standing grinning over Virgil. It’s not expecting him, and he hits it so hard they both hit the ground hard and roll. He snarls in fury and bites down hard into the creature’s neck, feels bones crunch and snap, and tangles his hand in its hair before tearing the remains of the head from the neck in a sudden jerk. It’s more than dead. He’s butchered it. He screams, long and loud and to no fucking avail. Virgil still lies broken on the ground beside the other corpse. The monster Benny refuses to call a man is leaking gore from a dozen wounds, staining the ground and fouling the air, and Benny scrambles to pull Virgil’s body away from the creeping pool of sick dark red. Funny, blood hasn’t once been appetizing here, not in all the years. 

Why? Why why why the word crashes and echoes in his head, and echoes in the bloody forest, and it’s only after his voice disintegrates into ragged sobbing that he realizes he’s been screaming it.

“ KILL ME! Come and kill me goddamnit! ” he begs, in a voice he himself can barely hear. He lashes out and his fist hits one of the tremendous boulders with an awful crack. Over and over he punches, his hand a shattered, pulpy mess, the pain a distant unfelt fact. When he can no longer move his right arm, he grabs at the stone with his unbroken left hand, steadies himself for a moment, and slams his head into it, sees sparks and tastes blood. He staggers back and clutches his head, eyes streaming, and his hands, already tacky with blood, come away wet and newly red again. He tries to smash his head once more into the rock, wants to beat himself into insensibility, but he falls and can’t right himself. He’s blinded by his own blood still streaming into his eyes, and he’s too weak to even sob. He lies like that for a moment until he coughs, and blood comes spilling out of his mouth, threatening to choke him as he lies on his back. Instinct overrides desire and he rolls to one side, retching, and drags himself back to the bloodsoaked ground where his friend breathed his last. He slumps with Virgil’s head in his lap, rocking back and forth, staring at nothing. 

Nothing comes to attack him. Nothing comes for days. 

—

He doesn’t know for sure how long it’s been since Virgil died, only that years have likely passed. He doesn’t care. Everything is insubstantial; the only thing that allows him to feel anything anymore is fighting. He doesn’t know what happens to someone like him when they die again down here, but wherever it is they go, he’s sent a fair few on their way. He thinks there might be an uptick in new dead vampires, but who’s to say? For a while, it seemed like he was seeing more of them. Strange things have been occurring lately, insofar as there’s anything that isn’t strange to compare it to. He just can’t find it in himself to care anymore. The days and nights are nothing to him. 

It’s on a night exactly like every other Goddamned night that he meets the dragon. Or rather, he doesn’t meet the dragon, so much as it nearly eats him . 

He’d stopped looking years ago. It’s not that he doesn’t believe the dragons are real anymore; he just doesn’t think finding one will matter at all. He’s hollow, empty. Every day the cold seeps further into him, leeches more out of him, and all he wants to do is sleep. Sometimes he still chases the ghostly feelings killing brings, but even that is just more work. 

He’d mustered up the strength for it this night, and another vampire lies broken on the forest floor, throat mangled, still gurgling as with every breath its blood gushes faster out of its cooling body. It — she — hadn’t done anything to him, was just wandering as lost and frightened as anything else in the forest. That hadn’t stopped him. He thinks there was a time it might’ve bothered him, but he isn’t sure. Remembering is a struggle, and there’s no point trying. 

He stands before the corpse, weapon hanging loosely from his hand, staring at nothing in particular, when a light, dim and weird, falls on him from above. It casts a shadow that almost makes the woman look alive again, like the chest is rising and falling with breath. Slowly, dread and shock creeping over, he looks up, and catches a glimpse of great wings, a huge, staring eye. He thinks it grins. Terror, a feeling he thought he’d left behind long ago, seizes him. 

He’s buffeted to the ground by the beating of wings the size of sails, and as he falls, a weight both sharp and crushing lands between his shoulders and he cries out as talons as long as his arm pierce his back. A sound like laughter, but far louder and deeper, and he’s released. He scrambles half-mad with pain and fear to his feet and takes off running again, whatever it is still just behind him. Hours he flees the thing in the sky, hiding like a rat from a hawk in the shelter of the trees, but no matter how long he hides or how far he runs, it always, always finds him, toying with him like a cat. It doesn’t tire, or get bored, or find any better prey, just stalks him through the woods far more efficiently than any creature on the ground. 

When at last he crashes to the forest floor and can no longer pick himself back up, the beast alights ahead him, wings bending and flattening the trees in a massive ring around them. He can’t bring himself to look up at it, and even if he did want to, he’s not sure he’s got the strength left to raise himself up to look. 

“Why, little one! Do you grow tired of our game so soon?” He as much feels the voice in his bones as hears it. He flinches away from a clawed foot larger than he is, but his frightful attacker just laughs again, and rolls him over on his back the way Benny might flip over a roach with the toe of a boot. Now he’s forced to see the enormous thing, in all its awful glory. 

As he somehow knew it would be, a dragon looms above him, huge beyond imagining. He almost wants to laugh. Of course, only now, now that his mad friend is dead and he knows nothing and doesn’t give a damn anyway, now what they spent so many years looking for, what Virgil died for, finds him all on its own. The dragon digs its talons into the earth to each side, a cage around his chest, and yet again, he finds himself the plaything of something far more powerful than he is. 

He does laugh then. Long and loud and fucking hysterical as it contemplates him. Eventually, after quite a long while, the laughter starts to die down to breathless, tearless sobs, and he stills within the dragon’s grasp. It bends its long, scaled neck down to peer more closely at him, and breathes hot and sulfurous in his face as it asks, “I imagine you’d like me to divulge my secrets, wouldn’t you?”

Silence stretches for a long moment, as Benny considers the thing in front of him. “No,” he says at last, and the word is heavy in his mouth. The dragon cocks its head to one side, an almost human gesture uncanny on something so completely inhuman. 

“I know you have searched for many years for one of my kind,” it says, polite inquisition a veneer over amusement. “I am here now, and yet you no longer wish to seek my wisdom?”

“Not anymore,” he says. “There’s nothing worth seeking. There’s no point.”

“You seem very sure of that,” it notes mildly.

“The escape hatch is just a rumor,” Benny says. “Just a lie we tell ourselves to stop us going mad. Everybody wants it to be true because we don’t wanna fade into ghosts in this God-damned place, but it’s not. There’s no escape. We all get what we deserve down here.” 

He’s tired, so tired, and he would hate and fear this wretched creature if he could summon the strength, but he can’t. He just wants to be left alone. 

“You are without hope,” it says, with nothing behind the observation but mild curiosity. 

“Is it that obvious?” he snaps. 

“Why would you despair, little parasite?” it asks. “Why seek escape at all? Are you not happy in the afterlife created for your kind?” 

Is he not happy? Is he not — ? The question swallows him, crushes every flip remark he might’ve made under the weight of that implication. 

“Why — why the Hell would I be happy?” he gasps, almost speechless with shocked fury. “This place is not meant to cause you grief. It is simply where a monster such as yourself should find his final rest. Purgatory is not meant to be a punishment .” It says this as if it were so obvious a child should know, as though the dragon’s shocked by the mere idea that Benny, that anyone, could think that.

“Are you gonna kill me?” he asks dully, after a moment of the two silently regarding each other. It laughs. 

“Should I? Is that what you want?” it asks. 

Is it? What is even beyond this fucking nightmare? At this point, oblivion seems childishly optimistic. What if he just wakes to find himself somewhere else in the forest, fully reanimated, unable to truly be destroyed? Or in some other, deeper, even colder circle, for all this isn’t Hell? What’s the fucking point of any of it? It’s not like he’s actually living. He’s been dead since the night he met the Old Man. 

“Do what you want,” he says. “I leave that entirely up to you.”

“What would one such as you have to offer me, little one? After all,” it slyly notes, “you are hardly an exemplar of unpolluted virtue. Perhaps I shall keep you as a pet.” There was a time those words would’ve made him shudder. He thinks somewhere, deep down, they still do. It’s just hard to feel it. 

“If it pleases you,” he says instead, and that’s that. 

Time passes. 

He asks, early on, if it’s a male or a female dragon, mostly for the chance to talk about something. Maybe it’s polite not to refer to a thinking creature as an it, he’s not sure. 

“I have no sex,” it says, thoughtfully. “My kind do not breed. We are a fixed, unchanging number. I suppose I am neuter, if anything. Does it matter to you?” they ask, with genuine curiosity, as far as he can tell. 

“No,” he says, “I guess not.” 

He chances another question. “What should I call you? Do you have a name?”

They laugh. “Our names are not meant for mortal ears. It is not meet that you should know such things, little parasite. If it is any consolation, I do not require your name either.”

It’s not. 

They teach him things, to pass the time. He tries not to notice how familiar it all feels, though the dragon, at least, has no interest in fucking him. 

“On Earth,” they tell him, “we are like shadows, chained within prisons of flesh, aping humanity, as all the true Horrors must. So many of the most powerful beings in this universe require vessels to interact with God’s most treasured creation .” That last part, they spit with some disdain. “Presumably, it is to protect His favored, second-born children from our true glory. We dragons were never like you, little one. I was no human, infected with the diluted blood of the One who is your true father. No, my mother made me herself, handcrafted as all of my brethren are.” 

The dragon frequently ponders their own interpretation of the same philosophy Virgil, and of course, everyone he’d known in life as well, had done. They seem to have a more directly informed opinion, but even an ancient Horror doesn’t know all there is to know about God’s universe. For a while now, he’s had plenty of opportunity to become well acquainted with the fact that despite all his theological study, he’s never known anything at all. 

“The creator long since took His leave of the world,” the dragon tells him, on the subject of God, “though some still argue He chooses to walk upon the earth, observing as He will. For myself, I do not believe it. It is obvious that God has simply left, or quite possibly died.”

For a second, he’s derailed, and the thought of God dying, not just Christ, but God the Father, dying , looms like a chasm of horror before him. He shuts it out. It’s impossible, and either way, irrelevant. 

“Besides, little one, God is not the divinity about whom you should be concerned. Your friend was right. There has been talk of late of an army, one that is to storm the gates of Heaven. I don’t know what has become of that, but whispers of a fissure continue, nonetheless.”

This army the dragon speaks of captures their full attention most of the time. They’re convinced something unprecedented will happen, and soon. Judging by all the strange weather and other deeply unusual happenings in the Woods, they might even be right. There’s been a glut of storms of late. The dragon shelters him under a vast and iridescent wing as rain, thick and foul with ash, batters at everything. Gusts as powerful as any typhoon bring down stands of ancient trees and threaten to crush him beneath the flying debris. The dragon fears none of it, naturally. 

“So there is to be a war in heaven,” they say one day out of nowhere, after a few weeks of observing this. They can hear whispers on the winds, apparently, from other worlds beyond Purgatory. The dragon is talking entirely to themself, voice low and contemplative. “What do you suppose he thinks he’ll accomplish?” they rumble. It’s unlikely they’d even register if Benny had an answer, which he doesn’t. 

As the day wears on, agonizingly slow, the dragon only becomes more agitated. By this point Benny can feel whatever it is is making them so jumpy in the air himself, a restless prickling in the atmosphere and whiffs of ozone and sulphur just at the edge of notice. The storm is growing stronger with each passing minute, and it would be dangerous, if he weren’t already dead and trapped in this endless, undead limbo. Despite his bitter apathy, however, it strikes fear into his heart. 

The wind pitches up to hurricane levels. A tree cracks with a noise like a gunshot and Benny throws himself to the forest floor to avoid being crushed. The rain’s soaked him through, freezing and sharp as it lashes him from all sides, and it’s near impossible to see for the wind and flying rubble. Out of nowhere, lightning flashes, and the sky is for an instant engulfed in blinding light. Against this, some terrible shape almost like a crack in the world itself is illuminated against the sky. The dragon sees this and roars in sudden outrage as Benny quails. 

“ No! I will not be reduced to fuel for the Rebel's artillery!” the dragon snarls, and takes to the sky in another crushing beat of wings, as the shape in the clouds glows red and then brilliant white. The forest, usually so still, is whipped by violent squalls stronger than any ocean storm Benny’s ever weathered. 

The wind screams like damned souls and through the trees it roars, a thousand times stronger than any dragon, the earth trembles, and like a nightmare of the end times, the sky splits open. For a second he sees the hole in the sky, and he thinks he might see something beyond it, but it’s gone as soon as his eyes settle. Blinding light engulfs him, engulfs everything, and he can feel himself sucked into the storm less by body than by soul. His feet don’t leave the ground and yet he’s dragged hideously forward. Something in him is tearing, he’s losing himself, agony like nothing he’s known before sears through him as the maw of the storm rips him apart…

And then it’s over, the world snaps back to gray and deathly quiet, and he’s still on his feet, like nothing ever happened. He collapses to the ground like a puppet with its strings cut, shaking. After some time, the dragon soars above him, and circles back to land with their usual unearthly grace before him. 

“What happened?” he rasps. 

“As you can see,” the dragon says, “the door was thrown open, albeit briefly. I have overheard the Celestial voices speaking of the man who would be king. However, the Rebel made a grave miscalculation,” the dragon continues, and they seem almost triumphant, vindictively pleased. “You tiny mutant creatures are not the only things in our forest who wish to escape it, little one. The Leviathan did not need to be dragged through the portal. They went willingly, and shut the gate behind them.”

“So it didn’t work? It didn’t work ‘cause, I dunno, some other freak in this waking nightmare jumped the line?” He’s angry, he thinks. He’s shouting. The dragon chuckles patronizingly.

“Be grateful your wish did not come true, little vampire,” they say. “Whatever the Rebel’s intentions, it is clear he has not the strength to harness Purgatory’s power. The Leviathan will have already overtaken him. It may be that your poor luck today saved what remains of your soul from a far worse fate.”

It doesn’t feel like luck. He stumbles to a tree newly felled, and his legs half-collapse underneath him. After all this time, he came so close, so damn close, and for nothing. 

"Take heart, young one," the dragon says, not unkindly, and Benny forces himself to look up again, into the bright eyes. 

“If egress was mere rumor before, it is surety now. There is a breach in the skin of this realm — larger, more thoroughly broken than what was there before — a place where the walls are thin enough between our world and the living lands that under the right circumstances, one might escape, should one be so able, and so willing.”

“And would you be so willing?” he cautiously asks. He needs to know, but for all he’s gone so long not caring about a damn thing, he thinks he might cut his own throat if he’s denied again. Hope, no matter how small, is insidious. It’s the strongest kind of poison. 

“Me?” the dragon laughs. “No, my young friend. You see, I don’t want to leave. I’m happy here. After all my suffering on Earth, I’ve finally come home.”

That still hits him like a weight, for all it doesn’t surprise him. “Oh,” he mutters, cold washing over him. The dragon nudges him with their giant snout, and knocks him to the ground again. 

“ But, ” they say, pointedly, “I would be willing, perhaps, to instruct you. Offer the tools necessary to perform the spell yourself.” 

The dragon speaks the words, makes Benny repeat them until they’re satisfied Benny’s saying them right. It requires blood, this spell. Blood, and one other crucial component. His heart sinks when he hears what final piece he’s missing, and despair washes over him, freezing, numbing in its totality. 

“Well now, you have almost everything you need, little one. A spell, a knife, a portal. All you need is a living human.” The dragon throws back their head and laughs cruelly, and the sound roars through the woods, hitting Benny like a physical weight. 

“So maybe sometime in the next ten thousand years, you’ll go free!”

Chapter Text

3.

Clayton, Louisiana, 2013

Out of nowhere, he awakens.

Benny takes his first breath of real air again, the first in fifty years, and l’amour de Dieu, how could he have forgotten this? How could he have ever taken anything so precious for granted? For the first time in half a century, he feels. It’s a cool night, and the air is clammy on his skin; there’s the sharp scent of turned earth and under that, the stink of rotting meat in the cemetery that humans can’t usually smell. There’s the buzzing of gnats and the rustle of leaves in the woods, and for a moment it’s all too much, too much. He might sink to his knees and weep at all of it. 

He hears it then, and catches the scent at the same time. A living, human heartbeat, and the hot, lush scent of fresh blood. His mouth waters, and he realizes he hasn’t fed in fifty years. It takes another second to remember whose blood it has to be, to remember why he’s here and alive again at all. He glances frantically around, looking to spot his savior, then he sees him. Dean Winchester, on his knees in the dirt a few feet away, hunched over a bleeding arm and an open grave. He whirls around when he hears Benny. 

“Wow, that was fast,” Dean says. Benny’s so damn giddy he’s afraid he’s gonna start giggling like a lunatic. 

He plays it off instead, goes for grumpy. Dean knows he doesn’t mean it. “No thanks to you. The Hell took you so long?”

“You’re welcome,” Dean grins and nearly takes Benny’s breath away as he clambers back to his feet. He might be feeling sentimental, what with being alive again, or at least the next best thing, but right now, Dean’s muddy, already sunburnt face is the most gorgeous thing he’s ever seen. 

“Everything working?” Dean asks.

“Good enough,” he says, and flexes his upper teeth to show off. Dean coughs pointedly and Benny grins and shuts his mouth again. Guess that hasn’t changed. 

“I’ll admit, I was worried you’d never even find my bones, brother.” He frowns, puzzled.  “How did you manage that, by the way?”

Dean inclines his head, nods down to the spot where, disconcertingly, the old skeleton still lies. There’s a headstone with his name on it, and he takes the time to wonder who gave him a proper burial and why. Somehow, he can’t imagine the Old Man bothering, though he grants that his ability to predict his maker’s feelings about him have never been all that accurate. 

He notices just then who isn’t here with them, and his heart sinks. He isn’t sure if he should mention it, but curiosity compels him. “Where’s Castiel?” he asks. Dean’s face darkens. 

“He didn’t make it,” he says, voice flat. 

“What happened?” Benny ventures to ask, though somewhat reluctantly. 

“He didn’t make it,” Dean repeats, and his voice is dangerous, a final warning. Benny takes the hint. He’s not gonna find out what happened there any time soon.

“I’m sorry,” he says softly. “Truly.” He’s nowhere close to cruel enough to say ‘I told you so’, and much though he and Dean’s best friend never got on, he was actually hoping the portal would allow him through. He doesn’t deserve to stay trapped in Purgatory, no matter what penance he thinks he owes. After everything, Benny’s not sure anybody deserves that. 

“Yeah, well,” Dean mutters. “Me too.” 

It kills the happy mood. They stand facing each other for a long moment, wordless. Benny cracks first. 

“So, what now?” he asks. Dean shrugs. 

“Like we talked about, I guess,” he answers, noncommittal. Benny’s heart sinks, but he tries not to show it. He was hoping they’d have more time. But it doesn’t matter. Dean’s got people, obligations to get back to. Not his problem Benny’s got nothing at all. They’re not each other’s problem anymore, period. 

“Then this is goodbye,” he says. Dean jerks his head and it might be a nod. 

“You keep your nose clean Benny, you hear me?” he orders, looking down with almost violent intensity at his own boots.

“We made it, brother,” he says softly, marveling. “I can’t believe it.” He can’t help but laugh, and giddily, he pulls Dean into a crushing hug. Dean actually lets him, and even hugs him back. 

“You and me both,” Dean says. 

“Oh, wait! I almost forgot,” he adds, and pulls out a wallet. He takes nearly every bill he’s got and hands the cash to Benny, who hesitantly reaches for it until he sees the amount and boggles. 

“Dean, I can’t take all this,” he mutters.

“Trust me, a couple hundred bucks ain’t what it was the last time you were breathing. Do us both a favor and skip the Catholic guilt about it.”

When Benny still can’t find an answer, Dean rolls his eyes and lightly punches him in the arm. “Tell you what, next time we run into each other, you can buy me dinner,” he says with a wink, and Benny snorts. Like that’ll happen. But he takes the money gratefully, nevertheless.

“Thank you,” he says. “I mean it. For everything.”

“Skip the chick flick,” Dean says and ducks his head. “You came through for me. I’m not gonna forget that. Ever.” 

He looks thoughtful for a second and adds, “Oh, and if you need to find something, go to the library, use a computer to google it.”

“Google…?” he asks. It sounds like a nonsense word. Dean waves a hand, struggling to explain. 

“On the internet. Uh, it’s like, I don’t know, you type shit in the search bar and it’ll tell you anything you need to know. But seriously, go to the library, someone’ll help you get on your feet. Listen, I’d stay, I really would, but I gotta get back to my brother. He ain’t been answering his phone since I crawled out of that hole in Maine, and knowing our luck, something’s probably seriously FUBAR.”

He grimaces. “Look,” he says, “I’m sorry. I’ll be there if you need, but Sam comes first.”

“Don’t worry,” Benny reassures him, “I understand. Go to your family, brother. I got some business of my own to take care of.”

Dean smiles in relief, then grabs Benny’s hand and writes a number on his palm to call should he need anything urgently, though with the pointed caveat that he should only call in an emergency. 

They part ways at the old crossroads that leads away from the land that used to be his and back into Clayton, Dean heading further up the road toward the highway either to hitch or catch a bus, whichever he happens upon first, Benny into town, to find himself a ride of his own. The sun’s an hour or so from breaking over the tree line. He might want to find himself a hat. 

He can’t ignore how immediately hunger set back upon him, and that’s gonna be a problem. It already hurts, and it’s only a few hours before he’s dizzy enough that he wouldn’t trust himself around humans. He pauses, contemplating the road, then backtracks back into the woods around the old property. He’s not quite sure what he’s looking for, but he finds it quickly nonetheless. He notices the scent of a dog, large and mangy and underfed. He thought he’d smelled it earlier, but Dean and his blood had all his attention. Against his better judgement, he follows the rank scent until he all but stumbles across the dog. 

It’d been dragging a back leg, which is tangled up in some kind of plastic netting. The smell of the rot is unbelievable. The poor cur’s already dying. He approaches it slowly, and it tenses when it sees him and growls, but it’s too weak to move much. He reaches out a gentle hand, and the dog tries to bite him but it’s easy to avoid. He wishes he had some kind of food to give it, but he’s a little light in that area himself. He settles for petting it on the head, as softly as he can, and making soothing noises at it. It shivers, and leans into the touch. Whatever miserable Hell of a life it’s had, it still can’t resist affection, however little is offered. He can sympathize. His sympathy only extends so far though; he gives the mutt one last pat, and snaps its neck. 

He does it clean. He has more than enough strength to make it quick, and the dog dies nearly instantly. Small mercy. He really doesn’t want to do this, but it’s been so damn long since he’s felt any kind of hunger that he doesn’t quite trust himself to hold out until he can get a hold of a blood supplier. He also doesn’t have long before the blood gets too sour to safely drink. He pushes aside as much fur on the dog’s neck as he can (not difficult considering it comes away in clumps from the mange wherever he touches it) and steels himself.

“Oh just do it,” he mutters to himself, and with a grimace, bites down.

It’s fucking awful. The dog’s dead, and it was infected, diseased, and also it’s a fucking dog, not a human, and for reasons he’s never known, the species does make a damn difference, but there’s really naught else he can do. He chokes down as much he can bear and then releases it, spitting and scrubbing at his mouth. It sates him, more or less. He might be stuck with animal blood for a while. He better get used to this. 

He buries the dog. It seems like the least he can do. 

When he’s done, he finds the road again, and makes to walk to town. He’s trudging up the road, already beginning to sweat in the warming early morning, when a pickup slows alongside him on the road and a window rolls down. 

“Need a ride, bro?” the driver half-yells, and Benny looks up appraisingly. He’s maybe a few years older than Benny, Creole and very dark. His long hair’s in locs, and he’s got half a dozen gold rings in one ear. Handsome. Benny supposes away from Dean and back in the world, he should try to remember how to ignore those thoughts. “Lemme guess,” the man says, “Car broke down?”

There’s something odd about the fellow that Benny can’t quite place, and it’s setting off vague alarm bells in the back of his mind, but damn. It’s good to hear an accent that sounds like home, for the first time in a damn long time.

“Yeah,” Benny nods along. “Actually, I think it’s a goner,” he adds. “You know a place I could get some kind of vehicle, cheapest that’ll run more than a mile without breaking down?”

The driver laughs, says, “sure, brother. I’ll do you one better if you like. I can take you into town, and I know a guy lookin’ to sell a camper, if that suits you.”

That suits him just fine, and he says so. He climbs into the man’s truck. It only occurs to him after he’s sat down that hopping into a stranger’s vehicle is precisely what sent his damn life off the rails the last go ‘round, but it’s too late now. The man offers him a hand to shake, and Benny takes it. In for a penny, maybe. If nothing else, he’s likely a good deal stronger and faster than his new friend.

“Name’s Antoine,” the driver says.

“Benny,” says Benny. Antoine grins.

“Pleasure’s all mine, Benny,” he says, a sharp smile curling the corner of his mouth. “Say,” he says, “what you doin’ back up the road there? That old house back there is cursed, y’know?”

Benny frowns. “Nah, I didn’t know,” he says.

Antoine wobbles a hand back and forth, noncommittal “It’s an old story, probably just ghost stories, if we’re bein’ honest, but Moman always told me to stay well clear. Local legend has it some fifty years back, the couple who lived there were killed — butchered by a terrible spirit, if you’ll believe it.”

Benny goes cold. 

“Yeah,” he mutters. “Just ghost stories.”

“But then,” Antoine says slyly, “what’s a ghost story to a vampire?”

It’s then that it finally hits him what’s off about Antoine. He hasn’t a heartbeat. Benny glances up sharply and meets his eyes, but Antoine only laughs. His teeth are white and far too sharp, but he . 

“Relax mon cher. You’ve nothing to fear from me. I could smell the dog on you a mile away. Anyone resorting to drinking a dead shyin is clearly in a hard way, and I wasn’t going to leave one of our own to starve.” 

“I — thank you,” he says at last. 

“It’s no thing,” Antoine says. “It seems like you could use a bit of kindness. I don’t know what others of our kind you’ve met, but we’re not all monsters, you know.”

One hand still on the wheel, he reaches behind him into the well behind the truck’s seat, pulls out a small cooler, and hands it to Benny.  

“Here, take that cooler in the back. I have more. And,” and here Antoine offers him up a business card with a flourish, “when you run out, call this number. Wherever you are in the lower forty-eight, you can find friends. Won’t always be free, mind, but you won’t lack for supply.”

“Listen, fellow vamp or not, I’m grateful,” he says. “I don’t know how to repay — ”

“Not about repayment, cher. I know family when I see them, too.” Antoine looks him up, and then down. “Fellow vamp or not.”

They pull up into a car lot, and before Benny can hop down, Antoine lightly taps his shoulder, withdraws his hand quickly as Benny flinches. 

“Go in peace, Benny,” he says. “There are others like us out there.”

“Thank you,” he says, fervent as Antoine waves him off. Profoundly moved and profoundly shaken, he takes the other man’s hand again, takes his cooler, and takes his leave. 

—

He’s not sure what to do with himself. 

He takes Dean’s advice, and goes to the library. It’s incredible. Like everything else, the libraries have changed a lot since the book wagons he remembers from his childhood, a hundred years ago now. They’ve got books, of course, but they’ve also got films to take home on loan, somehow, and games and cookware and quiet rooms and, above all, computers. Dean wasn’t exactly helpful, explaining what the internet is, but near as Benny can tell, it’s essentially the whole world, in a picture screen. It’s all very impressive, but entirely incomprehensible. 

It’s no use. Navigating the internet is hopelessly confusing, and he knows so damn little about the world in 2013 that everything overwhelms him. There’s simply too much to learn. Two thousand and thirteen, he momentarily marvels. It’s a year out of a science fiction novel. He’s a hundred and fourteen years old. He sticks around in Clayton, long enough to get himself a hat, a truck, and even a phone, small and ingenious enough to fit in his pocket. The scrap of paper he’d copied Dean’s telephone onto has been burning a hole in his pocket, and yes, it’s for emergencies, but he’s sorely tempted already. It’s only been a week and a half, but after a year of his constant, unwavering company, Benny feels a little adrift without him. It’s an unsettling thing to realize, frankly. 

As he considers his options, he’s taken to skulking around graveyards, idly looking for names he might recognize. Today is no different, and trying to stay out of the way of a funeral he didn’t know was scheduled for today. Odd thing. He’d caught the birth and death dates. The man’s much younger than him, and died of old age. After an hour or so’s indecision, he gives up the fight and dials the number. There’s no harm in at least checking in, he figures. Dean might be from this century, but that doesn’t mean he’s not having any difficulties adjusting. The phone’s atonal buzz sounds for only a few seconds before the line picks up.

“Hello?” Dean’s voice comes fuzzy but unmistakable through the phone, and the warmth he feels toward that voice startles him. 

“Hey, brother,” he says, and smiles into the words. “Just wanted to check in with you.”

“Wrong number,” Dean says abruptly, and the line goes dead with a click. What? He’s so stunned he just stands, looking stupidly down at the cellphone in his hand, for a solid minute. 

Dean calls him back another minute later, apologetically.  

“There he is,” Benny says, smiling again just to hear his voice. 

“How did you get a phone?” is the first thing Dean asks. 

“Would you believe they sell these things in convenience stores now?” he says, and can’t keep the wonder out of his voice. “A lot's changed in fifty years.”

“Must be a hell of a lot to take in.”

“Mostly it's the choices, you know? So many choices.” He glances over again at the funeral, and it’s not really funny, per se, but something about standing here newly resurrected and watching a pious family lay their grandfather to rest, makes him want to laugh, a strange fey urge. He doesn’t. He’s not sure he’d be able to stop. 

“Yeah, I hear that.” Dean’s voice drags Benny out of his morbid thoughts. He sounds uncomfortable. “Listen, Benny. Not to beat a dead horse, but — what we did down there is what we had to do. I don’t regret it for a second, but, you know, maybe until we both adjust, it’s best we don’t talk for a while.”

What we did down there…

Yeah, that’s about right, isn’t it?

“There it is,” he says, and Dean must catch the somewhat reproachful amusement in his voice because he pushes on like he didn’t just say it, “One day at a time, just like we talked about, right?”

“I think you had it right, bud,” he says wistfully.

“What's that?”

“Purgatory was pure. I'm kind of wishin' I had appreciated it more. You know? Like you.”

“Listen,” Dean half-interrupts, “you got an emergency, you call me, you understand?” Benny can recognize the dismissal well enough. It doesn’t sting, much.

“I hear you. You keep your nose clean, too, brother.”

“Yeah,” Dean says hurriedly, and hangs up. 

Benny stares down at his phone for a second before he snaps it closed. Dean’s still not gonna talk about any of it. Whatever, it doesn’t matter. Dean is Dean is Dean, and Dean may be a friend, but he’s no longer Benny’s responsibility. 

That’s not the worst lie he’s ever told himself.

—

He considers going the three hours south to Carencro, but his mind shies away from seriously considering it. He can’t go home until the nest is dealt with. He briefly entertains the idea of New Orleans next, to try to get a handle on where the fleet might last have been, but that too makes him bristle, and he decides he just wants out of Louisiana for now. He can come back whenever he likes, he tells himself. He has all the time in the world. He heads west.

In the end, luck’s on his side, tracking the nest. He’d sat down to try and calculate, based on how long they usually took on a global tour, where the fleet might be right now. He’d tried, and then given up, because there were just too many variables. Summer’s just easing into autumn in the Northern Hemisphere, so if they haven’t left North America, they aren’t going to until May, but that had told him next to nothing. All he can really try to do is check up on old haunts and hope they’re somewhere close enough that he can reach them without a boat of his own.  

He takes a stab at a place in Washington state where they’ve overwintered a number of times before. He also hazards a guess on a name, John Vanderzee, and cautiously assumes he’s got the right man. That name’s an old favorite, along with its many variations. There are five craft registered to Vanderzee docked at the Eagle Harbor marina, and the names are unfamiliar. He expected that. Even with the Old Man’s meticulous care, eighty years is long damn time to keep a boat in continuous working repair. There is a name missing, and it might make him hesitate, but he knows Paradiso is too big to berth at most harbors. He can only assume she’s around somewhere, anchored in the bay near the island the Old Man was partial to. He makes a decision, and heads for the harbor.

Benny drives down to the marina and crosses himself before he enters, suddenly gripped with anxiety. He pulls around and into the parking lot and sees it again, the first time he has in five decades. The Pacific stretches out deep green and eerily calm in front of him. Looking out, his heart fills up with twisted longing. How could you hate something so beautiful? How could you love something so terrible? He hates that the first person he ever thinks of when he thinks of the sea is the Old Man, before his crewmates, before even Andrea. The little thrill of fear and excitement at the thought of tracking him down is tainted with a sick nostalgia. I really do want to see him again, he thinks, disgusted with himself. How can he possibly feel anything but hatred for someone who did nothing but ruin his life? How on Earth can he miss the man who murdered him?

He parks at the marina and settles in to wait, wishing for a smoke, or a drink, or something. It might take the edge off. He figures most of the crew are all holed up at whatever place the Old Man’s commandeered, but a few will still be watching the boats. Paranoid as his father is, it’s best not to assume that the fleet is left entirely unguarded, even in a harbor as safe as this. 

He proves himself right when Quentin of all people climbs out from the cabin of a small sloop moored near the end of the marina, and steps off onto the dock, humming tunelessly to himself. He’d forgotten Quentin does that. He’s staring at a cell phone, and that alone is enough to throw Benny off, the sight of something so foreign in its modernity in Quentin’s hands. 

He notes the motorized boat, her sleek fiberglass lines and conspicuous lack of sails, and takes a mournful moment to wonder if all the fleet that he remembers has been upgraded and replaced over the years, though he can’t imagine the Old Man ever giving up Paradiso, not even for the sake of inconspicuousness. 

He wonders all of a sudden if he should be doing this. After all, Quentin’s every bit as trapped as Benny was back then. They almost all of them are. Sure, most of the fleet crew joined up of their own volition, but the Old Man was never exactly big on explaining what exactly being a part of his crew entailed. Mostly he just enticed whoever he took a liking to and then held them on Paradiso until they were too far gone to leave. If Benny deserves a second, third, tenth or whatever the Hell chance he’s on now, don’t they? Or, the grim thought continues, does that just mean you never deserved all the second chances you begged for and lost in the first place? The phantom sensation of being held down, weight on his legs and the hideous dragging anguish of the saw, is at war with the memory of I’m not like you, I’m sorry. He’s just as complicit as any of them. Nevertheless, it’s Andrea’s face he sees behind his eyelids, purple and bruised, a ragged hole torn into her throat. 

He moves out of the shadows. 

“Hello, Quentin,” he calls, and is glad that menace shows in his voice instead of dread. Quentin jumps and whirls around. 

“Benny!” he gasps, “no, it, it can’t be you.”

“I get the confusion. You of all people should know I was really, truly dead.” The reasons hang unspoken in the air between them. “Where is he?”

“Are you serious?” Quentin scoffs. “Do you really think I'd tell you where he is?”

“Well,” he exhales a humorless ghost of a laugh, and gestures with the machete, “I guess I was kind of hoping you wouldn't.”

“On the other hand,” Quentin says, almost sly, “I could show you where he is, after me and my boys take off your hands and feet.” Quentin nods, and two guards Benny’d figured must be lurking somewhere finally make their presence known by circling behind him. The hairs on the back of his neck prickle. 

“Well, don't go through all that trouble on my account,” he says, trying oh-so-very hard to remain calm, to keep his tone from betraying the way the threat puts him back on his heels. 

“Please,” Quentin says. “You go and crawl your way out of the hole we stuck you in for another ride on the merry-go-round? The Old Man's gonna want to see this for himself.”

“Mm. Well, they might be able to kill me. And that's all right. ‘Cause if they do, I know exactly where I'm going — and who I'll see when I get there.” 

He makes to tip his cap, and tosses it lightly aside. Quentin snarls and bares his teeth, tensing for a fight, but unluckily for him, it’s no contest. Benny parts the poor boy’s head from his neck before he can even move to attack. He never was any kind of fighter. He turns back to the other two, both men he’s never seen before. They’re both armed with knives, teeth extended, and unlike pauvre bête Quentin, they know how to use them. The closer man lunges, shoves him back into a wall and bares his teeth, but Benny knees him in the groin and when he doubles over, wrenches him off. He dispatches him clean with one swing. 

The Old Man must be doing fairly well right now, because just then another two men round the corner, all vampires, and — oh shit, these two, he does recognize. It’s Piotr and Carlos. 

“What the — ” Carlos gasps, jerking to a halt to stare at him.

“I know, right?” Benny laughs, “Still don’t quite believe it myself, if I’m honest,” and he takes advantage of their shock to start swinging. The other man he doesn’t know isn’t the fighter Benny was expecting, and he goes down easy, but Carlos is another matter. 

Piotr holds back, and Benny realizes he’s on the phone, and there can be only one person he’d be calling — oh shit , this whole revenge scheme is going sideways in the cradle. He ducks a punch to the head automatically, and rounds on Piotr. One cut severs wrist from arm, the next head from neck. He shoves down panic as a voice he hopes he doesn’t recognize calls out in increasingly worried tones, and crushes the phone under his boot. The screen cracks, but the call hasn’t ended, somehow. He stomps down again, and this time the phone shatters, gratifyingly, but in that distracted moment, Carlos manages to score a searing gash into his right shoulder, and another down the back of his left thigh. The machete slips in rapidly-numbing fingers, blood pouring from both wounds, and he bites back a scream of rage and pain and turns and tackles Carlos into the ground, ripping his old crewmate’s throat to ribbons with his teeth and finishing the job by hacking weakly with Carlos’s blade until enough of his neck is pulpy gore that his eyes glaze and he finally succumbs. 

That’s the last of them. He collapses on top of Carlos, chest heaving more out of instinct than necessity, and the weapon clatters to the ground. All of his wounds catch up to him at once. It’s too far to try for his truck. He doesn’t want to be anywhere near here come morning, when Quentin’s crew doesn’t check in and the Old Man sends another man out to search. If they find him like this, utterly fucking helpless, he’ll be back in the ground not a month after his resurrection, with nothing to show for himself and his suffering but more humiliation. 

Or worse, a small and disconcerting voice reminds him, the Old Man could decide not to kill you just yet...

There's nothing else he can do. He fumbles for his cellphone and with clumsy fingers punches in the only number saved on it, hopes to God or the angels or whoever may be listening that he makes it in time. That he comes at all. The phone rings and rings, and for a long moment he’s afraid no one’ll answer, before at last the line clicks, and Dean picks up. 

“Hello? Hello? Uh, hang on. There's not enough bars.” He hears movement and the sound of breathing over the line, a door opening and closing. Distantly he wonders if everyone can hear that much over a modern phone, or if it’s just another vampiric oddity. Dean’s voice drags him back to the present, and he almost wishes he hadn’t. The present hurts.

“Benny?” Dean hisses. 

Talking is nearly beyond him. He frames each word with deliberate care, speaking slow like a drunk to a cop, trying not to let his speech slur too bad. “Hey, Dean. You, um. you got a minute? Afraid I messed up, buddy.”

Wrong thing to say, evidently, as Dean with sudden apprehension growls, “What did you do?”

Of course Dean would go there first. “Nah, man, not like that,” he mutters. 

“Well then what, man? You sound like death warmed over.”

“Picked a fight, ‘fraid to say,” he says. “Some other vamps.” 

“Jesus, are you okay?”

He manages a laugh, though he coughs up some blood as he does it. “You should see the other guys. Five on one, not bad, right?”

“I'm sorry. You took on how many? Are you crazy?”

“Heh. See, the thing is, my legs, they ain't working so good. There's a fuel barge not too far from here. I'm pretty sure I can make it at a slow crawl. I was kind of hoping maybe I could ask you for one more favor?”

“Whatever you need,” Dean says fervently, “I’ll get it. Just sit tight, man, I’m comin’ for you.”

By lucky coincidence, Dean’s only one state over, and promises he’ll be there in just a few hours. All Benny can do is follow Dean’s order, get to the barge, and wait for rescue. Pray he comes in time. 

—

Like a miracle, Dean arrives. 

He shows up in the old barge Benny's managed to haul himself into, machete in one hand and cooler full of blessed relief in the other. He hears his name on Dean’s lips and likes to imagine it’s worry makes him shout like that. His face swims into Benny’s vision, and he looks touchingly concerned.

“Benny?” Dean says again, softer now. “Not lookin’ so good.”

God, it’s good to hear his voice. How’s it only been a month? 

“Up yours,” he says, and laughs. 

“Let’s get you outta here,” Dean says, and slips an arm around Benny’s back to hoist him to his feet. Benny very nearly collapses immediately again, but Dean takes all his weight and lowers him slowly back down. 

“Gimme a bag first,” Benny mumbles, “Oughta help some.”

“Right,” Dean mutters, “vampire first aid. God my life is weird.” He fishes a blood bag out of the cooler, pops the seal, and carefully tilts Benny’s head up to close his lips around the cannula. He’s too weak to do more than suck at the bag, but he meets Dean’s eyes as he swallows. Dean’s hand is at the back of his neck, but it barely registers at all, as numb as he is by now. His thumb strokes the side of Benny’s face, probably unconsciously, and that he can feel, soft and gentle and almost unbearable. There’s an abrupt, visceral sucking sound as he finishes the bag, and Dean starts just a bit and they both look away. He releases the cannula and the last of the blood in it leaks out onto the corner of his mouth. Dean, without thinking, swipes his thumb over Benny’s lip to wipe it away. 

He can feel his ears burning as he stares at the ground. "Y'still want me to buy you dinner?" he says, to cover for it. 

“M-maybe some other time,” Dean says, and coughs. He studiously avoids Benny’s eyes as he pulls him up again, and this time, with Dean taking most of his weight, he can keep his feet. Barely. They manage as far as a cabin office, where Dean deposits him in a heap on the floor of the head, and Benny waves him off from there. For some reason, he doesn’t want Dean seeing him like this — vulnerable like this — any more than he already has. Instead, he steadily drains one bag after another from his cooler, and leans out of the way as the sun brightens the room despite the blinds, then slowly dims again. At some point, exhaustion gets the better of him, and he dozes curled up in the corner. By the time he wakes, he’s feeling well enough to stand and it’s evening again. Dean’s made it back to the barge from wherever he’s spent the last few hours.

The barge’s head is small but functional, and he splashes frigid water on his face and scrubs as much blood as he can from his hands and forearms. Dean was kind enough to grab him a clean shirt from his truck, which is a good thing considering the ruin to the one he was wearing. He can feel his strength returning, though moving too fast sends pain shooting up the leg Carlos cut, and makes his head spin. 

“Wow.” is the first thing he hears when he finishes cleaning up and returns to find Dean staring, startled and shameless. 

“You, uh.” He swallows gracelessly. “You look okay.”

“Getting there.” He grins. Dean's reaction is a boost to his ego, no doubt about that. Dean recovers enough to say, “Dude, you were double-hamstrung,” half accusatory. Benny shrugs. 

“Yeah, well, a little rest, a half a cooler full of AB-negative,” he says, “most wounds short of an amputation will mend up, vampirically speaking.”

“Uh-huh.” Dean doesn’t sound convinced — or maybe he’s just not comfortable with the reminder, vampirically speaking. 

He slings his bag of assorted weapons over one shoulder and grabs his cap. “I'll be a hundred percent before you know it.” He offers a hand to Dean, feels his warmth yet again as they clasp hands. “Thank you, brother,” he says, sincerely.

Dean doesn’t look mollified, however. He hunches his shoulders, the set to his jaw suspicious and stubborn, rather than defensive. “Benny, what's going on?”

He laughs, tries to play it off. “Oh, your work here is done, Dean,” he says. “You already saved the day. You know, I got my, uh, deal, and you got, what'd you call it? A family business?”

“Benny.” Dean’s face is flat and unmoved. “What's going on?”

“You and that whole ‘friend’ thing, man. Y’know, you ain’t careful, saving everybody else is gonna get you killed one day,” he says, and yeah, he’s teasing, but in that way that’s just enough of a joke to pretend he’s not deadly serious. 

“I mean, it’s a little too late for that,” Dean points out, and they both have to allow at least a breath of laughter, bitter as it is. 

“Well, it's good to know you're still dumb as ever,” Benny says.

“Yeah, well,” Dean grumbles defensively, “some things never change. Now, why are you getting into machete fights with your own kind?”

Benny debates the merits of blowing him off for a moment, but ultimately settles on honesty. “Quentin, the one I came for? We were in the same crew. I'm hunting the vampire who turned me, my maker.”

Dean, naturally, perks up at that. “Well, now, don't get me wrong,” he says, “I'm down with the hunting, but, uh…why?”

“Kill him before he kills me. Again.”

Dean’s been rifling through Quentin’s things as they talk. Benny ponders how to explain, or if he even should.

“Quentin and I went way back,” he murmurs, more to himself than Dean. “One of the Old Man's favorites, next to me, it turns out.”

Dean nods distractedly, thumbing through a notebook. Benny realizes what the contents are likely to hold before Dean tells him.

“Listen to this,” he says, bemused. “‘Age of Aquarius II, 0800’, and then there's some other numbers all crossed out. Some other weird names here, too: ‘The Big Mermaid’, ‘Solitaire’ — it's all crossed out, except this one. The ‘Lucky Myra’.”

“Yachts. Names of yachts. ‘ Lucky Myra ’,” He plucks the notebook from Dean’s hand, and flips through it himself. “‘ Age of Aquarius II ’.” He wrinkles his nose. “Look at this one, ‘Sea You Later’, spelled s-e-a. I mean, come on.” Rich people don’t deserve yachts. Shame they’re the only folks who’ve got them. He tosses the notebook back on the table and Dean snatches it up again. 

“So, then these are launch times,” he says. “And what, destinations?”

Benny nods. “Except none of them ever get there. The Lucky Myra left yesterday afternoon,” he says grimly. “I guarantee you it's already been hit.”

“What do you mean, ‘hit’?”

“Boarded, burned, and buried at sea. My crew, that's how we fed. How we always fed. We kept a tight little fleet, maybe a half-dozen boats. Nothing ostentatious, just pleasure craft. I must have circled the Americas ten times during my tour. A few of us would act as stringers and patrol the harbors, looking for the right-size target — fat, rich yachts going to far-off ports. Take down the boat's name and destination, radio it to the crew in the water. And then we just, uh...let the ocean swallow up all our sins.”

“Vampire pirates?” Dean says with an equal measure of disbelief and delight. “That's what you guys are? Vampirates?”

Christ, Dean is a baffling man. How the Hell does he come with this shit? “You know,” he says, amused, “all the years we ran together, I can't believe nobody ever thought of that.”

“What do you mean? It's like the third thing you say.”

“No, it isn't.”

They stare at each other for a minute, both at a loss, and probably a little punch-drunk. Or maybe that’s just him. Dean does inspire his bizarre combination of affection and violent annoyance. Dean waves them both past it, somehow.

“All right, so, your maker is set up to feed around here, right?” he asks, still rifling through défunt Quentin’s affects. Being Dean, he pockets the cash. “Well, what are we looking for?”

“Well, he likes to live in style,” Benny muses. “He usually rents legitimately. Always remote, always coastal.”

“So an island, maybe?” Dean says, and Benny nods. “You got a cable bill here. Hmm, Quentin's got the NFL package. Prentiss Island. Heard of it?” Another place he never thought he’d see again. 

“Oh, yeah.”

Dean claps his hands, slaps Benny on the back. “Well, we ready? You can fill me in on the way down.”

 —

Dean Winchester’s car is apparently a classic, even a throwback, and yet to Benny, it feels oddly futuristic. He supposes that makes some amount of sense. After all, while it’s forty-odd years old now, it’s a model from about five years after Benny was killed — or so Dean explains. Dean keeps it in fine condition, and talks it up to Benny all the way back from the marina, like a girl he’s sweet on, or something. It’s a handsome car to be sure, though with a chassis that low he can’t imagine how Dean drags it down back country roads on monster hunts. 

The radio comes on as Dean starts the car, and it crackles its staticky buzz for a few seconds, the song too distorted to hear. Dean sighs with the patience of a doting mother and smacks the dashboard twice. “C’mon, Baby,” he says under his breath, and the sound comes warbling back. 

...fly the ocean in a silver plane, see the jungle when it’s wet with rain...

Nausea rolls over him and he shudders. “Can you shut that off?” he says through grit teeth. “Please,” he adds belatedly.

“What, you don’t like Dylan?” Dean says, mock-scandalized. It’s not the singer, he wants to say, it’s the song. He hasn’t heard that song in years, not since — he doesn’t wanna think about it. 

“Just — can you turn it off, please. I...can’t.”

“Sorry,” he says with a shrug and switches off the radio. Benny sucks in a breath and wishes he felt less awful. He can’t fathom why the song would bother him at all, much less this much. Hell, it’s not even the same singer. They drive in silence for a few minutes, Benny staring out the window, weighing whether to drink another bag. Dean shifts a little, and changes the subject, though admittedly, not very much. 

“So, if you were your maker’s favorite, why’d he kill you?”

Ah, there’s all the questions he put off answering for so long before. He has to think about that, figure out how he could possibly explain it all. He wonders if he even wants to. He opens his mouth, hesitates, thinks for a moment, falls silent. He tries again.

“When you get turned,” he begins, “it's like you're reborn into a vampire nest. Your maker, he means everything to you.” He gives in and reaches across the backseat for the cooler, pulls out a bag and pops the seal on the plastic tube. “I mean, you really start believing he's God. Now, if your maker happens to believe the same thing, well.”

Dean shifts a little on his side of the seat. “See how that could be a pickle,” he mutters, shooting a frown at Benny.

Benny only 'hmms' in response.

“Well, hey, uh, do you really have to do that? I mean, right now?” He jerks his head towards the blood bags and coolers and grimaces. Benny forces a laugh. 

“I’m sorry, brother. I’m better, but I”m still on the mend.”

“Right.” Dean keeps shooting furtive, guilty little looks toward Benny as he finishes up and tosses the empty bag back in the cooler. If he’s being honest, he’d be better off downing the whole cooler full, but blood’s not terribly cheap when it’s not harvested direct from the supply, so to speak. Best to ration what he has left. If that means he’s still a touch light-headed, so be it. If it’ll keep Dean happy, that’s just a side benefit.

“Anyway,” he continues, “our father, he was a jealous god. He kept the family together but kept us apart from the rest of the world, always at sea. I always did what was best for the crew...‘til I met her. Andrea. Andrea Kormos. Beautiful. I mean, words don't even cut it, you know? Greek, heiress.”

“Come on,” Dean scoffs.

He lets Dean pull the story out of him, highly abridged though it might be, and for a moment loses himself in wistfulness. God, Andrea. He stumbles a bit over his execution, the saw at his throat, but Dean, for once, is understanding. 

“Well, that's what payback's all about, am I right?” Dean says when Benny finishes, and if it’s awkward, at least he’s kind enough to end the conversation there. Benny can only nod.

“Docks are up ahead,” he says, by way of a subject change. “Should be able to find a dinghy to use.”

Quentin’s dead, and it’s one thing to dream about revenge, to let it guard him from despair and madness fifty long years, but it’s another entirely to be here, now, with half a mile’s worth of lagoon and a few loosely guarded doors all that stands between him and it. They do indeed find a motorized dinghy, unwisely left poorly tied off at the smaller of the piers. They’re only borrowing it. Ideally they’ll be done before anyone can miss it. 

Prentiss Island looms up ahead, the few mansions located there secluded from view by the trees aside from their highest turrets. The sound of the motor makes him wince, but it’s a short ride across the lagoon to the woods around the side of the house the Old Man usually lets. Dean jumps out and splashes lightly in the shallows, then helps pull the boat the rest of the way in and tie it off, not much more securely than how they’d found it. Benny tosses him the bags, and when he turns away, fixes the line. No reason they should be careless. They wind their way through the woods.

He hears a low buzz, and glances back to see Dean fiddling with his phone. He cocks his head in a question, but Dean holds up a hand and shakes his head. 

“We're close,” Benny warns. Dean, still looking at his phone more than where he’s going, only nods. 

The woods are giving him the creeps, and it’s no question why. 

“Remind you of anything?” he says softly, as they walk. Dean taps away at his much fancier phone and only grunts absently in reply. Whatever it is is distracting him is also clearly aggravating him deeply, and he shoves his phone back in his pocket with an irritated noise. They stop for a second while still under the tree cover, and both pull out machetes. He’d really like to get out of the woods. They’re too familiar, and he’s feeling — too much. Of everything. 

“It's weird being back,” he mutters. “In the world, I mean. Isn't it?”

“Sure as hell is,” Dean says, preoccupied. 

“I mean, what do you do with it all? All the – all the everything? Hell, I don't even know if this world is real, if I'm real.” His own words sound far away, like someone else is saying them.

Dean’s face softens, and he turns to stop Benny, grips his shoulders and looks him in the eye. 

“Hey, listen to me,” he says urgently. “I’ve seen what happens down that rabbit hole, okay? We're real. Benny, this is real. It's the only way to play this game, you get me?”

“Yeah,” he murmurs. For a moment he wonders if something’s about to happen. Dean’s standing so close. But he falters, his eyes slip down and he looks away, and the moment’s over. He yanks his hands away from Benny’s shoulders like he’s just been burned, turns away and clears his throat. 

“Well c’mon,” Dean says, not looking behind him. “Night’s not gettin’ any younger.”

Dean takes the lead, picking a deliberately meandering path up to the house, practised eyes watchful for security cameras in the trees that Benny wouldn’t have even known to avoid. He steers them away from the grand front steps and to a servant’s entrance around the side, where he digs a professional’s set of lockpicks out of a pocket. He gets a look at the door and makes a face. There’s no real lock, just a fancy metal keypad.

“Credit card trick ain’t gonna work on a trust-fund roach-motel like this.” Dean scrubs a hand over his face. “Sam’s usually better for this shit. I mean you could probably kick down the door but I don’t wanna bust in like Hulk Hogan if we can help it.” 

He rifles around in his bag of magic tricks and comes up with a small electric drill. Benny watches, fascinated, as Dean very slowly drills a hole into the wood at the side of the door, and, when he’s done, inserts one of his picks into the hole. He wiggles the pick around, tongue sticking out of his mouth, until a thunk comes from within the lock. “That’s it,” he whispers, crooning in satisfaction, and flashes Benny a devilish grin as he turns the door handle. He tenses momentarily, then relaxes. 

“See, no problem — not so much as an alarm,” Dean says smugly. “Don’t even need Sammy at all.”

“Color me impressed,” Benny says truthfully, and Dean beams. They slip into the servant’s entryway, weapons at the ready, and move near-silently further into the house. Now that they’re in, actually in, unease is setting in. 

“Time to move, Benny,” Dean says under his breath. He isn’t really listening. He’s barely thinking straight at all. 

If his heart could still beat, it would be pounding fit to burst by now. As it is, his hands are shaking. Just inside the foyer, a familiar sight stops him dead in his tracks. “The Old Man’s harpsichord,” he mutters, by way of explanation. God, he hates that harpsichord. Dean gives him a look of frustrated incomprehension and moves on ahead. 

“Benny!” Dean hisses, but Benny ignores him, because a framed photo on the little end table beside the harpsichord has caught his eye. He hardly registers the movement as Dean throws up his hands and slips near-silently to the next room, as immediately and completely as the picture catches his attention. The most beautiful woman he’s ever seen gazes back at him, dark eyes as piercing as ever, from a picture that can’t be more than five years old. 

“No,” he whispers, and it’s a prayer, a plea, a numbly desperate denial. “No, no, no.”

A voice calls softly, “Benny?” as though from a dream, across fifty years, and he forces himself to look up, and sees the person he’s missed more than almost anyone, the last person he wants to see, here and now.

“Andrea.” he says. His attention’s so wholly fixated he doesn’t notice the men coming up behind him, doesn’t so much as hear their footsteps, until his knees are kicked out from under him, and a sudden sharp pain in his head draws him under faster than falling into a nightmare. 

—

“Gonna make me do this all over again, aren’t you?” 

His voice comes from just behind Benny, so close his breath tickles Benny’s neck. So many years since he heard that voice. For a second, just a second, longing and affection drown out the poisonous twist of hate in Benny’s heart, and all that’s left is, I missed you. It doesn’t last, of course. But he feels it all the same. 

“Hello, Sorento,” he says, and is absently proud that nothing shows in his voice. He forces his eyes open and immediately wants to shut them again, to make what he sees not be true. It won’t work, he knows, but it doesn't stop him wanting. In that moment he remembers what he learned in the seconds before he was ambushed, and he forces himself to meet Andrea’s eyes. 

She’s exactly like he remembers her…almost. The same beauty, the same aristocratic face and lovely dark hair, the same long fingers and strong sailor’s stance. There is a difference though, any number of tiny details just hardly off. She’s too still, absent the coiled energy and constant motion she once had; there’s no heat coming off her skin. But it’s not just that; more than anything, most noticeable is the lack of heartbeat pounding away beneath her breast. Her blood is sluggish and still in her veins. She smells cold, the way no human smells, and she looks like a perfect statue, an uncannily life-like sculpture utterly absent of life. Exactly like the man who made them both.

“He turned you.” The words are heavy. She doesn’t deny it, just nods. 

“Sorento, go,” she says quietly. “Tell the Old Man it's true.” He scowls at her, but obeys, and isn’t that...odd.

“He listens to you?” he asks when Sorento leaves. Her mouth turns up humorlessly. 

“It's been a long time,” Andrea says. “Our father has come to trust my judgment over Sorento's. I answer only to him.”

The way she talks — like he once talked — drowns him in grief. He strikes out against the bitter disbelieving sorrow the only way he can. 

“Well, sleeping with God has got to have some perks,” he says, deliberately cruel. Her eyes shutter and the look on her face is, somehow, even colder than before. It was probably the wrong thing to say, but Hell if it wasn’t accurate. He should know. 

She strikes him across the face, hard enough to send his head snapping to the side and leave him blinking stars from his vision. Definitely the wrong thing to say, but no less correct for it.

“Yes, it does.” She looks to the men behind her, two sailors he doesn’t recognize. “Make sure the Old Man has everything he needs.” 

The guards depart. Benny doesn’t have much time to contemplate any of this, before Andrea grabs him by the collar and drags him face to face with her. Her eyes search his face, like he’s a puzzle she’s trying to solve, and she strokes his face with her too-cold palm. Abruptly, she pulls him even closer, kisses him fiercely. When she pulls back, there are tears shining unshed in her eyes. 

“Oh, Benny,” she says, hands gripped tight around his shoulders, “when I heard you were back, I don't know. Somehow, I knew it was true. I had to believe it, to hope.”

“Andrea, what happened? The old man said he was gonna bleed you dry.”

“I don't know. He changed his mind. I blacked out. When I woke up, I was drinking from his wrist.”

The horrifying weight of that settles on his shoulders. He couldn’t protect her. She didn’t even get the mercy of death.

“I'm sorry,” he says heavily. “All this is because of me. I'm sorry.”

“No. It's not your fault. You never hid anything from me, Benny. I chose you.” She blinks, and rests her head against his. Her skin is still so cold. For a moment, all they do is hold still like that, neither of them breathing. 

“I begged him to give you a grave,” she admits, her words hushed and near-strangled. “They were going to leave your body to rot. I couldn’t bear leaving you to that last indignity. I didn’t think the Old Man would actually do it, but he thought it over a while and then agreed. He made Sorento and Quentin go back to Clayton to bury you.” He’s caught suddenly between laughter and tears, and love for this woman so powerful it closes around his throat, tries to halt his speech.

“You brought me back,” he manages, and damn it, there are tears in his eyes and emotion still choking him. “Without my bones I couldn’t’ve returned. It was a longshot and I didn’t think I’d ever make it, but you saved me again, Andrea.”

“But why'd you stay,” he can’t help but ask, “with them, with him? Why?”

She waves a hand, tries to explain. “You remember what it's like at first,” she says. “First, everything resets. Life is blood. That's all. And whoever gives it to you — ”

“I know,” he interrupts. He doesn’t need her to justify herself. Not Andrea. Not to him. “It's complicated. Every damn thing is complicated.”

Andrea pulls something from her waistband and offers it to him. It’s a clasp knife. A pretty damn big one. 

“It doesn't have to be,” she says quietly. 

“Andrea,” he says helplessly, but she cuts him off.

“Benny, I can't kill him,” she says, slipping the knife into his coat’s inner pocket as she does so. “None of us can. But you, you came back from the grave. You're proof that he's not all-powerful, that he's not God. He's scared of you, Benny – I know it.” 

She pulls something else out of a pocket, and this she tucks into his palm. A key, presumably to the cuffs. 

“You understand,” he says to her, steady but urgent, “that I came back to burn his operation to the ground, to stop the killing?”

A door opens and they both flinch. Sorento returns, now with a large kukri at his hip. 

“Do what you came for,” she whispers hurriedly, “and we can be together.” She presses her palm to his face, one fleeting gesture of comfort, then straightens up and backs away, her face smoothing back into an expressionless mask. Sorento still glances at her with a suspicious frown.

“He wants Benny brought to him,” he says, and Benny wishes he were better at lying to himself, that those words don’t send terror through him. Sorento hauls him roughly to his feet, and he shuts his eyes for just a second, trying, somehow, to brace himself, as he’s marched through the door and down the hall.

—

The Old Man is standing with his back to him, and it’s been fifty years, but nothing’s changed at all. 

“Hello, Father,” he says, because what else is there to say? The Old Man turns, and for just a second, emotions flare and change on his face, shock, anger, delight? before shuttering back into a mask of indifferent, weightless curiosity that’s wretchedly familiar. His face. His beautiful inhuman face that stares at him and through him and reminds him of his place, a white trash boy leaving swamp muck on the furniture, a dancing bear too big and stupid for the bone china. The Old Man quirks his lips into something that someone might call a smile, if they weren’t paying attention to the threat.

“Benny,” he says, and his voice is still musical, still makes Benny stand up to attention, desperate for his approval. “I have no words.”

He forces himself to laugh and match the Old Man’s tone. “Now, I know that ain't true.”

“Can you help us understand?” he says, with what sounds like genuine interest. “I know you don't owe us anything, but how? How are you here, standing in front of me?”

“I found a way back.” He shouldn’t be saying any of this. It doesn’t matter how he got back, he just needs to kill the man and go. But his feet won’t seem to move, and he can’t stop himself from talking. It’s distracting the Old Man from the key he’s holding in shaking fingers, at any rate.

“From Hell?” The Old Man sounds invested in the answer, surprisingly.

“Right next door, as far as I could tell.”

“Next door? What's that?”

“Oh, I think I'll just have to show you.”

“I know it won't change anything,” he says, and there’s a nasty note in his voice, “but I regretted having you killed. When it was all done, I wailed when I saw you in all those pieces. Didn't I, Sorento? Didn't I wail like the ugliest baby in the world?

“Yes, father,” Sorento’s voice is dully obedient.  “That's when you decided to turn his cow.”

“Poor So-So is bitter because your 'cow' outranks him now.”

“Why didn't you let her die? She meant nothing to you — ”

“But she meant everything to you. If that's all I could salvage from my wayward son – the woman he defied his maker for – I wanted someone to remember you by.” 

He ducks his head almost bashfully and laughs. “She’s nothing compared to you, of course. But who would be?”

He bites his lip, such a sweet expression, like he’s feeling shy or something, and he stands on his toes, pulls Benny in to kiss him with a possessive hand gripped tight behind his neck. He smiles and laughs into Benny’s mouth as Benny shudders at the touch, and whispers, “I missed you. God, I missed you.”  

The Old Man pulls away at last and regards Benny with more tenderness than Benny honestly thought him capable of, his pretty face shining with the sincerity of his emotion. “I love you, Benny,” he says, amazement in his voice as though he’s just discovering this himself. “You know, I really do love you. I didn’t realize that until I let you be taken from me.” 

He’s never said that before. In all the years Benny sailed with the Old Man, for all his demands of love, of fealty and worship, Benny had never heard it in return. His stomach roils with the sudden, overwhelming realization that he means every word. Sorento is standing rigid in the corner, his hand around the kukri so tight his knuckles are white, jaw locked in disgust. 

“I don’t love you,” he says, slowly, shakily. The Old Man draws sharply back. Sorento glances at him, frowning. 

“What was that?” he says softly, as dangerous as Benny’s ever seen him. 

“I said I don’t love you, Old Man. You ain’t my lover and you ain’t my God. Not anymore.” 

Saying it, speaking the words, feels like drawing poison out from a wound. Painful, arduous, but — when it’s done, he feels…cleaner. The Old Man isn’t happy to hear it, though. His fist clenches, and abruptly he hits Benny in the face, the same spot Andrea had. His is the considerably harder blow. Benny’s head snaps back and he briefly sees stars, and tastes his own stale blood on his tongue, but something inside him sings, strange and beautiful. 

“That’s perfectly fine,” the Old Man says, the flush of rage high on his cheeks belying the calm words. “That’s okay. You will. We still have all the time in the world.”

He says that, and yes the threat is still terrifying, and yes, he’s still trapped, but the Old Man maybe doesn’t know his thoughts anymore, maybe can’t control them. Benny realizes this with something alarmingly like hope, and all the while, he twists the cuff key between his fingers. 

The Old Man scowls at him and paces the floor in front of him. “I suppose you coming back from the dead — well, that's the definition of mutiny, isn't it?” he says quietly. “All of this has me feeling so... tired.”

“You should have let me go,” Benny says, for all the good it will do. 

“But, Benny,” he says pointedly, “I don't let things go.”

“Really? You lived so long, how is it you have so little, hmm? Nothing but a beat-up old harpsichord and nest of hyenas.”

“I have the sea. And I have Andrea.” And now I have you, lingers unsaid between them. 

“No,” he says, still trying for calm. “You don't have her.” He pulls the unlocked cuffs off his wrists and holds them up. “At least that much I know.”

The Old Man, who seems deeply unsurprised by this revelation, nods to Sorento, who snarls, “Oh, that dumb bitch,” with an almost gleeful fury, and lunges, slashing at Benny’s throat. 

Sorento always was the better fighter of the two of them, always placed more stock in the idea that he should be. But it’s been fifty years, and all of them spent fighting for his life, or his soul, or something, down below, and Benny’s not ornamental anymore. He catches Sorento by the wrist and snaps the loose cuff around it, throws him backward into the cabinet behind him. He snatches up the knife. 

He shoves Sorento forward, then pushes him to his knees. He keeps one heel on the handcuffs and grabs Sorento by the hair, yanking his head back hard. This is for Andrea. All of it, everything, for what was done to her — to both of them. She’s alive, and the fact of that sings strange joy through him, but he can still see her tear-stained face, and what’s more — he knows exactly how she must have suffered. It’s for Andrea, and for what was done he’ll get his fucking payback, except — 

“When the hell did you learn to fight like that?” There’s wonder, and something awful like admiration in Sorento’s voice, something strange within his eyes, and Benny remembers soft reluctant laughter, wry wit, remembers kissing him on an empty dock on Kos island, remembers the teeth of the saw in his neck. Remembers how desperately he wanted to escape, and how he never believed it possible.

“I've had a lot of practice,” he says, the strangled words forcing their way out of him, and the kukri’s edge is so keen, it’s the work of one swing to part the head from the neck. His old friend collapses, in two pieces. 

He spreads his arms a little helplessly and lets the blade drop to the floor.

He’s breathing hard and there’s blood on his face and memory threatens to choke him, but he’s not done yet. “You just gonna sit there!?” C’mon, Old Man, he thinks wildly, do it, do something, anything, try to hold me down and hurt me you bastard, I’m ready now, I’m not fucking afraid of you the way I was when I was yours. I’m not yours anymore, Goddamnit. But his maker does nothing. 

The Old Man just sighs in that overdramatic way of his, glances down at Sorento’s body like it means nothing to him, because it does mean nothing to him. 

“You're right,” he sighs again, waving a careless hand. “I've been here so, so long, Benny, seen all the outcomes, all the patterns a trillion times. It all means so little. This universe is a pyramid of despair, nothing else.”

“A little dark.” He talks like he’s so old, the Old Man, but Benny’s met things in Purgatory that make his father seem like an infant in comparison. He just wishes the things he’s saying didn't make so much sense.

“I am evil, after all,” the Old Man says dryly. “At least I've had that much to keep me cold at night. You never had that, did you? Everything had to be thought about, considered.”

“You know what Socrates said about a life unconsidered.” Somewhere in the back of his mind, disconnected from the part of him that’s doing the talking, he thinks, this conversation is fucking surreal, it’s going off the rails, it’s all going wrong. He doesn’t know how to drag himself back to what’s important, and he suspects that’s the point. 

The Old Man rolls his eyes at the reminder. “Yes. But what we have in us? Benny, that’s not life. That’s what you still don’t get.” The Old Man stands, crowds in close enough to kiss again. “That’s why it’s always been so hard for you,” he murmurs, “my poor Benjamin.”

The words sink into him and cut like razors, and suddenly he’s not present, not fully anywhere, and — 

(... hands on his face and the back of his neck, whispered poison in his mind, knees on his chest and ‘goodbye, my Benjamin’ …)

— and he fucking snaps. He grabs the Old Man by his slender shoulders and throws him bodily into the china cabinet, and the shattering glass harmonizes with the frenzy in his heart, suddenly too much of this unnameable emotion to shove back down into the dark places within him. There is too much, too much of everything, and he’s just killed Sorento, and for forcing him to do that alone he can’t let the Old Man live. For every other God-damned injury, every fucking wound to his already damaged soul, he wants his many pounds of flesh, but Sorento is dead and Benny killed him, and no punishment Benny knows how to inflict can answer for that. He just needs to die. 

“Get up,” he hears himself say. 

The Old Man laughs through his bloodied nose, the same fey humor he’d had when he’d massacred the crew of the Eurydice and sawed off Jonah’s hands and feet. The same laughter Benny’s seen in Dean.

“This is the one last thing I can take from you,” he says. He closes his eyes, and Benny can feel the order to lay down, posture supplicant, to wait for more guards, but maybe Purgatory did cleanse him of something, because it has no effect on him. 

“No!” He snarls. “You try, damn it, you try and kill me again!”

“This is my story, you gnat,” the Old Man says furiously, but strange — there’s something almost like panic in his voice.

“Get up!”

“It ends the way I choose, not you,” he says, but the words are petulant, and there’s fear, genuine fear, in his eyes. The door stays shut. No one is coming. 

Benny hauls the Old Man up by the elbow to kneeling and stares into his maker’s face. 

“Well, at least I can finally show you something new, Old Man,” he says, and pulls out the clasp knife, flicks it open. There’s nothing in him but clean, calm fury. “A whole new world.”

“You once wept over every human we slaughtered,” the Old Man says desperately, “now you really think you can kill the man who made you? No one else has ever given you so much! You can’t do it Benjamin,” he pleads, “I know you, you’re not that kind of man.”

“What kind of a man am I?” Benny says. He’s oddly detached, like he’s floating above himself, untouched by all of this. “You remember the night you asked me that, right? Well, I got an answer, Father. What kind of a man am I?” he asks again as he sinks the blade into the Old Man’s throat. “The kind you made me into.”

It’s not that big of a knife; it takes a long time to cut through enough of the flesh to silence the screaming. 

—

Poor Dean, he thinks giddily, taking the stairs two at a time, knife still dripping in his hand. 

He thinks of Dean still clearing the rest of the nest, and wonders distantly how to tell him about Andrea. He doesn’t think he’ll mind, much. It is funny, Benny finding his purest love again totally unexpected, while Dean had the man he’d spent so long searching for ripped right from under his nose. It’s not fair, but Benny can’t bring himself to mind.

It’s all going to work out. For once in his damned, too-long life, or undeath, or whatever, something went right. Every other second he remembers again that Andrea’s alive, lets the knowledge fill him up and feels lighter than air, like a buoy rising to break the surface of the water. 

He slows as he descends the stairs, crosses the hall and gently lays his bloody knife on the top of the harpsichord’s casing. He’s feeling punchdrunk and the sight of the Old Man’s own blood staining the beautiful painted wood makes him want to laugh. 

“The Old Man is dead,” he says, can hardly believe he can say it. “Let’s go.”

Andrea takes his hand, but her face is pensive and she doesn’t move. Out of nowhere, suspicion rises in him, along with a sudden thrill of apprehension. 

“Where, Benny?” she says softly.

“What are you talking about? Anywhere.” She looks at her feet, and the gesture feels frustrated but meek. She’s holding back the words. It’s not something she would’ve done, before. 

“You're not leaving here, are you?” he says heavily. It’s not a question. “And you never were.”

“We have everything we need right here,” she says. “The operation is still perfect. We can ride the high seas, plunder together. We can have the life we always wanted.” There’s something dark, almost manic in her eyes, a wildness both achingly familiar and frighteningly unlike her. She’s still possessed by the Old Man, still worships him.  

“What I wanted was to leave a burning crater behind. I wanted to put your memory to rest,” he says.

“But I'm not a memory,” she says, and stares into him, beseeching. “Benny, I'm right here.”

He did the same thing to you that he did to me. All of it, everything. He made you a monster. His damn punishment worked. He made you like me. 

“What I loved,” he says, and it’s like the words are dragged out of him against his will, cruel and awful and too honest for love, “it ain't here anymore. It was snuffed out a long time ago by monsters like me. Like what you've become.”

“You think you’re better than me now?” she asks angrily, and it hurts, it hurts because he knows her anger like he knows her joy, knows them both like he knows his own reflection. 

“No,” he says, the words heavy and bitter on his tongue, “I think we’re all damned.” 

She snarls at him, so suddenly he doesn’t see it coming, and like a nightmare coming true, she bares her sharper teeth and lunges and she’s going to kill him she’s gonna finish the job and then there’s a thud like a hacksaw lodging in a spine and her head’s not attached to her shoulders anymore and Dean’s standing behind as Andrea collapses, bloodied machete still gripped tight. 

It all happens so fast.

—

“A vamp is a vamp is a vamp.” 

They’ve wiped down all the surfaces they could think of, piled the bodies, including Andrea’s, in the cellar, covered the corpses in salt, and burned everything. The mansion’s owner’s gonna have a grisly surprise when rent comes due. Dean turns to him, wiping his bloody hands on the clothes of one of Benny’s old crewmates. He won’t stop explaining himself. Benny’s getting tired of the apologies, mostly ‘cause Dean’s not actually saying sorry. 

“And I suppose I’m just a teddy bear with teeth,” Benny says, but he’s tired. He doesn’t want to fight. 

“Look, I’m sorry, okay?” Dean snaps, “but I had to. You weren’t thinking clearly and she was about three seconds away from ripping your head off. I don’t know what it is about you that’s different, but most of your kind are still bloodthirsty killers, literally. No offense,” he adds, and then sighs, runs his hands through his hair. “I mean I get it, you know? I’d be in the same boat if it was Ca— well. Anyways.” 

Benny’d shown Dean to the mansion’s servant’s quarters, where he remembers they used to keep their victims. Dean had kicked down the door and greeted the six humans in various stages of exsanguination with a practised reassuring smile. Benny hung back, unwilling to so much as look at them. They’d ushered everyone out the back door as the flames climbed higher and ate into the building, and Dean had coordinated the least-ill among them to wait for paramedics, pretending to be some sort of fed. Now, they slip around to the other side of the island, back where they came. He pauses as they shove the dinghy out into the water.

“Why’d you do it, Dean?” he asks dully.

“Do what?” Dean says absently. 

“Resurrect me,” he says. “You could have drained my soul into any culvert, and no one would have been the wiser.”

“What the hell are you talking about?” Dean’s eyes narrow suspiciously, and he grabs Benny’s arm. “Hey, you good?”

“Man,” he says quietly, more to himself than to Dean, “I don't know what I am.”

They round a bend in the lagoon, and out of nowhere he sees her. Paradiso, far too large to dock at Eagle Harbor’s small marina, is moored out in the bay. Even as far away as she’s anchored, she looms, ominous in the dark. Fifty years and nothing’s changed, still the mere silhouette of that boat sends dread through him, even now her captain’s dead. She really was a sanctuary, he thinks. A home and prison all at once.  

Dean lets out a low whistle. “Holy shit,” he says, “now that’s a boat.”

“You have no idea how much I’d like to burn that fuckin’ yacht,” Benny says, mostly under his breath. Dean shoots him a sympathetic look. 

“I’m sorry man, we ain’t got time. Cops’ll be here soon,” he says apologetically, and Benny nods in numb agreement. He doesn’t know what he would even do. But as they turn away from Paradiso he grips the side of the dinghy so hard the metal railing bites into his palms. Eventually, they move out of sight of it, and he shifts uncomfortably, scratches his head, probably just to have something to do with his hands. A thought occurs to him, and it’s so terrible that somehow he barely even feels it. It’s just too big. 

“She'll be in Purgatory,” he says, softly. Dean turns to look at him. “Andrea,” he clarifies. “She won't go to Heaven.”

“Well hey, man,” Dean forces out a laugh, “heaven's not all it's cracked up to be either.”

That thought sits sour in the back of his mind. 

“No, listen man. It's rigged, all of it's rigged,” Dean goes on, something urgent in his voice. “No matter where you end up it's just a fucking shitshow. All you can do is try to get the best life you can out of that sliver of time between birth and death. The rest of it’ll fuck you over either way.” 

He says all this like it’s supposed to be reassuring. 

There’s a long pause, one that says everything and absolutely nothing at all, and then Dean, staring out into the dark water, deliberately not looking at him, says, “I really am sorry.” This time, he does sound like he means it, for all the good it does. 

“Me too,” he says. They don’t speak for a while after that. 

There’s a man waiting for them on the dock. 

“I called Sam,” Dean says, jerking his head toward him by way of explanation. Benny lets him change the subject. The air’s too heavy between them. He nods wordlessly, and wonders what the famous Sam is like, what he’ll think. When they’re close enough, Dean tosses the mooring line to the man on the dock, who takes it without greeting them and helps pull the dinghy in, tying off the line as they step off. He’s tall, even towering over Benny, and well-built. Long hair, hard muscle under the same twenty layers of shirts Dean wears, surprisingly soft, open baby face. The look he has for Dean is impatient; for Benny, suspicious. 

“I’m Benny,” he says, offering his hand for Sam Winchester to shake. “Heard a lot about you, Sam,” he says as they clasp hands. He must feel Benny’s cold hands, his lack of a pulse, and, hunter that the man is, he obviously knows what it means. His free hand flicks to the clasp of a leather sheath at his hip and the long knife inside it. Before Benny can pull away, before he can react at all, Dean gives the tiniest shake of his head, and just like that, not a word spoken out loud between them, his brother relaxes, releases Benny’s hand. It’s peculiar, how immediately and completely they read each other. 

He wants, all of a sudden, to pull Dean close, press in and kiss him, long and slow and sinful. He wants to see what Dean’s brother, with his knife in its sheath, will do about it. It’s not on, he knows. It’s not fair and what’s more, it’s downright dangerous. He doesn’t do it, but he knows he could, and for just a second, he thinks Dean might realize that as well. The thought is strangely, viciously satisfying. 

“Well,” he says instead, “I can see you two have a lot to talk about.” He grabs his bag, gives Dean an entirely too brotherly slap on the back, and slips between them, deliberately not looking back. He makes it back to his truck head up and back straight, which is a small favor, at least. He pulls out of the parking lot and sees the beginnings of some kind of argument starting up between Dean and his brother in the rearview mirror, and resolutely fixes his eyes to the road. He manages about a quarter mile up the road from the marina before suddenly all of it, everything, the sound of the car and the scent of real air and teeth like knives in Andrea’s mouth and her blood on his face for the second time in fifty years is too damn much and he pulls over on the shoulder so fast he can taste the rubber of the squealing tires in the back of his throat. 

Some small fast car behind him lays on the horn and he dimly notices a finger out the window, but he’s breathing too fast and too shallow to care. His eyes prick and burn but tears don’t fall. He’s not sure he remembers how to cry. Instead, he huffs a breath like the ghost of a laugh, thinking of something. His breathing comes shorter, and he realizes that he mightn’t have had to mourn at all if he’d just let Dean clear the building without him. It’s not funny, it’s just that it’s so terribly fucking funny. All this time, all these years she’s been dead in his mind so why, why, why does this hurt so much, losing her all over again? He’s laughing at nothing, at how awful everything is, and he’s laughing so hard it hurts, which it shouldn’t since he doesn’t need to breathe since he’s a fucking monster who’s so far managed to poison and ruin and shatter everything in his path. He’s laughing, and out of nowhere he punches the dashboard, hits it and keeps hitting it until something cracks under his fist and he realizes he’s bleeding, and now the tears come. The laughter collapses into sobs, full, huge, ugly things that wrack his whole body. He doesn’t know how long it lasts. 

Eventually, there are no more tears, and he sucks in a shuddering breath that isn’t strictly necessary but feels a hell of a lot better than hyperventilating. There’s a long crack running the length of the dashboard, a jagged edge of plastic just barely red with blood. His hand’s still bleeding sluggishly, he notices, on the already bloody shirt that just this same evening Dean gave to him to replace the other bloody shirt. His face is wet and tacky from tears, as is, revoltingly, the front of the shirt and the collar of his coat. Shame at the weeping creeps up from the pit of his stomach, and he’s desperately relieved he managed to get away from Dean and his brother before he lost his damn mind. 

He sits on the side of the road for a while. The air gets colder and the cars fewer, and for a long time he doesn’t think of anything. The silent woods in the dark are still familiar, and the weight in his chest isn’t homesickness, but it is uncannily close. It’s only as the light grays into morning and dawn creeps over the trees that sense truly returns. He has no plan. It quite never occurred to him that he’d make it this far. 

He’ll go back to Carencro, he decides, so suddenly it’s like the idea just dropped into his head of its own accord. There’s nothing holding him here, or anywhere. No matter what, it’s done. He’s free to do whatever he pleases, and maybe all he’ll find are grief and unpleasant memories, but God, it’s been so long since he’s been home. 

—

End Act One