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Chapter Text

There was a time when I would look in the mirror and wonder what it was he caught sight of in those unguarded moments when his eyes would stray to my face and the corner of his mouth would soften, a virtually unperceivable transformation from the pleasant mask he wore as an expression. The woman in the mirror seemed too ordinary for him, her hair the brown of maple bark and her face pretty enough but indistinguishable from other decent looking girls. I knew that he deserved beauty, even as he searched for intelligence and companionship.

I also knew that no matter how much I believed that I wasn't good enough for him, that I would never let him go.

He was mine.

When Kerry awoke that morning, it was to the images of a fleeting dream, the last stray strands of webbing holding the memory of it in place washed away as she blinked at the sunlight streaming through the edge of her bedroom curtains at just the proper angle to alight over her eyes. She blinked hastily, it never occurring to her to attempt to hold on to those vanished dreams and cherish them. She let them go, and easily went on with her day. It hadn't been, after all, the type of dream she would want to linger and languish over with her hand between her thighs and a sigh on her parted lips, but neither had it been one of blood curdling fear, making her body feel poisoned and wrong for the rest of the day.

It had just been a dream: random firing synapses that meant nothing. She wasn't one to put stock in the meaning of such things. The only dreams Kerry cared about were those which were synonymous with 'aspirations', and those she had plenty of.

"It's the oddest thing," Kerry told Nelle, dropping her large shoulder-bag onto the top of her already cluttered desk. "All day I've felt like I'm missing something."

"Not something newsworthy, I hope," Nelle quipped, leaning her hip against the side of Kerry's desk. She fumbled with the lens cap of her professional camera, turning it about with her fingers with little thought. Later, when she went to pack the camera away into its carrying case, she would curse at the need to make a quick adjustment to the focus from where her fingers had dislodged the fixed setting.

"No," Kerry responded with a thoughtful frown. "Something personal. Something I'm forgetting."

"A birthday? An anniversary? A bill payment?" Nelle prompted helpfully.

"No. No. And probably, but that's not it." Kerry laughed. She pushed her purse onto the corner of her desk and grasped a handful of papers on her desk, shuffling them into a neat pile and placing them in a folder. "I'll probably figure it out eventually," she said, putting a handful of pencils in the drawer where they belonged.

"Your desk is a mess," Nelle said with a laugh. "If you rearranged it at night before going home, you could save yourself time in the morning."

Kerry shot her a withering gaze from beneath her eyelashes. "At night I just want to get home and eat."

"But you love your job," Nelle observed. She then grinned slyly. "I guess you love your boy toy more."

"Nelle!" Kerry exclaimed with a blush, glancing around the office for ears turned in their direction. In a newspaper office, she knew that a good number of the reporters perked up at any sign of gossip.

"Well, it's true. If I had a McHottie like Luke at home, my desk would be a mess too."

Kerry almost scrambled to answer the phone when it rang, wanting to disrupt the current conversation. She paused with her hand hovering over the receiver, waiting for the second ring so she wouldn't seen too eager. "Good morning, Brockport Tribune, Kerry Nowicki's desk."

"Kerry. You need to get down to the canal between Redman road and Student lane. They've found a car submersed in the water."

Kerry's eyes quickly swung to the window separating her boss from the main room, noticing the blinds were closed and so it wasn't evident that he was on the phone. She felt a thrill rush at the fact that he had called her, though at the moment there was no one else. "Theft?" she questioned, reaching for a pad of paper and a pen. She wrote "Gallant" on it, referring to her new editor-in-chief, and shoved the pad to Nelle.

"A call's been placed to the morgue."

"Oh really?" Kerry questioned, her voice stressing both surprise and excitement. She swatted her hand at Nelle, who had straightened and was now giving Kerry her full attention. Kerry made frantic motions with her hands, mimicking taking pictures as she pointed to the camera case on Nelle's desk containing extra film and a spare digital camera. Nelle jumped off the desk and lunged across the space to grab the case.

"What are you still sitting there for?" Her boss said harshly. "And bring that slacker photographer with you."

Kerry hung up the phone with a grin and grabbed her purse. Rearranging her desk, drinking a second cup of coffee, and checking her emails would all have to wait. She was on assignment – a real one – and it filled her with a buzz of excitement unlike anything she had felt in a while. "Come on," she said to Nelle, grabbing her by the arm, "let's go. We've got an assignment."

"What's the rush?" Nelle asked, stumbling behind her. "This isn't like those big city events you see on TV with all the reporters milling about for a story. If it happened in Brockport, it ain't going anywhere for a while."

Kerry shot Nelle a quelling look, dragging her friend through the glass doors to the front of the newspaper office. Nelle was right about the Tribune not being like the big-city newspapers. For one thing, there were only three full time reporting positions, four part time, and a few freelance. Over the past two years Kerry had managed to work her way up to part-time. Nelle was fortunate enough to be the only photographer attached to the paper, practically inheriting the position from her great aunt. Nepotism was alive and well in rural America. "I want to get pictures before the M.E. reaches the scene and removes the body."

"Body!" Nelle exclaimed over the roof of Kerry's car as she got in. "Whoa. That's totally unexpected. Where are we going?" Nelle had finally caught up with the enthousiasm, tapping the foot of her crossed leg against the dashboard.

Kerry filled Nelle in on the particulars she knew from Gallant, few as they were, and turned the car towards the outskirts of town in the direction of the SUNY Brockport campus. Nelle didn't point out that even if they got there on time to get pictures of the grisly scene, that there was no way it was going to print. Small towns did not use the remains of their own citizens to sell papers. Both girls were young and idealistic enough to still want their names involved in a big scoop.

"This is the assignment," Kerry said. "I can feel it. Something big is going to happen. I deserve this. I worked hard to get off those puff piece assignments and into crime. You know I did. When I came here from college with all those journalism awards under my belt I really didn't think my talents would go to so much waste." Really, Kerry thought, she had moved down in the world.

"You got this job because Rebecca's on maternity leave," Nelle reminded her, hand braced against the dashboard as Kerry took a sharp corner, bouncing onto the soft, rutted ground leading to the waterside.

"Yeah, but I was the next logical choice."

"Because Marty's in traction after breaking his leg in three places pursuing the Duncan story."

"He really broke it when his wife pursued him with her car when he slept with Duncan's widow."

"See," Nelle pointed out, "you were the only one left and it isn't as if much crime happens here to get put on the crime beat page. In the last issue your major story was about a kegger getting noise complaints."

"Don't be such a downer," Kerry responded sharply and then sighed. "Aren't you the teensiest bit excited?"

"I've taken pretty gruesome pictures before. Remember that big accident on the highway last year? Frig! Would you slow down?"

Kerry ignored Nelle as the car rounded a bend on the dirt road, undercarriage scraping dangerously over the high middle. A parked tow truck loomed in front of them, the yellow body contrasting with the black and white police car parked next to it. Kerry pulled off the road, the car going over the road bump with a dangerous jar and mowing down thick, weedy grass to create a space in an empty field to park. Kerry could only hope that underneath all the grass there wasn't marsh, or it would be her car that needed the tow truck.

She got out of the vehicle, dismayed to find her sensible work heel sink into the soft ground. Luckily, it wasn't too wet, which was a blessing for this time of year when the river was swollen with runoff from melting snow, and even the most solid ground had a tendency to retain water. She only wished she had thought to change into the sneakers she kept in the trunk.

"ICK!" Nelle exclaimed as she poked a toe at the ground, not actually stepping foot out of the car. "I'm wearing three inch stilettos. Can I borrow those sensible running shoes you keep in the trunk like a girl scout?"

Kerry sighed with impatience, itching to go join the group of officials milling around the water bank. She could see a few familiar faces, including police officers who were good friends of hers. She retrieved the shoes for her best friend, and then left Nelle to change into them as she walked down the remainder of the road. She could feel the familiar thrum of excitement at the idea of finally becoming a full-time reporter, which was exactly what would happen if she did well on her assignments while filling in.

This story was it.

"Kerry!" one of the police officers exclaimed, breaking away from his conversation with the police chief in order to approach her. Kerry wove to Chief Atherton as she paused and waited for Luke to join her. "What are you doing here?"

"I'm working," Kerry said with a smile, taking in his broad shoulders in his uniform and the way his hair glinted blond in the sun. "Same as you."

"Hardly the same," he told her, grinning back. "I have a gun."

"Oh Luke, believe me, I know," Kerry smirked. "I've seen you use it. So tell me, what's going on here?"

"Some high school students skipped school to smoke some grass and one of them got dared to go skinny dipping. He found the car and apparently wanted to see if the radio was salvageable."

"In a car underwater?"

"Yeah. It can happen. Anyway, he didn't even get the door open before noticing the body. I'm not even sure how he did that. One of the divers said it was all bones. The car's been there a while."

"Really?" Kerry asked, bemused by the fact that Luke was so willing to talk about the case with her, a reporter. She wasn't sure if it was because she was his girlfriend or if it was a small-town thing. A lot of the guys on the police force didn't mind talking to her. Kerry liked to think they knew she had integrity, but that probably wasn't it. Kerry was trying to formulate her next question, her mouth already posed to speak when Luke interrupted her.

"Hold that thought," Luke said, his fingers brushing against her arm. "I'm being hailed." He gave her a quick kiss, almost missing her mouth entirely, and then hurried off to talk to a group of his bosses and coworkers.

Kerry shook off the goofy smile evident on her features, the one she reserved for moments when she was under the spell of her boyfriend, and reminded herself that now was the time to be serious. She could see someone else she knew standing close to the water edge, and she made her way over to him, wondering why he wasn't standing with his coworkers.

"Hey Kev," Kerry said, tilting her chin towards Luke's partner as her greeting, watching in vague amusement as he ate a powdered doughnut without spilling any of the sugar over his dark blue shirt. That would explain why he wasn't with the crowd. The other cops would tease him for being stereotypical.

"Hey Kerry," he muttered, white powder puffing from his lips. "Hard at work or hardly working?"

"I'm working real hard at keeping up with your fresh wit," Kerry bantered back, feeling herself relax as she stared out in the water. She tried to remember who had disappeared from town in the past few years, but she couldn't come up with anyone except for the wife of a local businessman, and she had been found later cohabing with a younger man. It was like the Momma Nowicki story all over again, only without the missing laundry machines and with a few thousand dollars in private investigator bills.

"I save my best for you, babe," Kevin responded, shoving the last of his doughnut in his mouth, jelly squirting out of the corner of his mouth.

Kerry hid a smirk. "I feel sorry for you, if this is your best attempt at conversation."

"If you really felt sorry for me, you'd sleep with me." Kevin's attention was drawn from the water and towards someone walking up behind them. "Hey Luke, why is it that your girlfriend won't have sex with me?"

Luke rejoined them, his arm brushing against Kerry's. "She has morals. And standards."

"Then why are you with him?" Kevin turned his attention back to Kerry. "Luke couldn't even find a woman's clit if it had a huge flashing arrow pointing to it. Seriously, why not run away to Vegas with me?"

"There aren't enough antibiotics in the world," Kerry retorted with a mock shiver.

"You two," Luke interrupted scornfully. "They're about to tow the car out of the water, so if you can stop exchanging some of the most clichéd banter I've ever heard, then maybe you'll be able to witness something—"

"Cool?" Kevin asked, cutting Luke off.

"I was going to say 'that doesn't happen often in Brockport' but it is pretty cool." The men grinned, having a bonding moment over cars and death.

Kerry shook herself out of being amused at their conversation, remembering that she was here for a reason that had nothing to do with teasing Kevin. She turned back to the river and watched the rusting, silt-coated car emerge from the water, her small camera recording the event even as Nelle snapped rolls of film. There was silence among the people milling along the bank, and Kerry recognised the M.E. waiting first in line. Dr. Roberts looked grim as he observed the tow truck pull the car out slowly, the old bumper not looking as though it could take much more of the pressure.

Kerry recognised the car as a Nova and took a step forward for a closer look. The frame groaned and creaked as water poured out of any available seam. Kerry stopped breathing, her face going white as she realized the vehicle wasn't just familiar looking. She knew the car and knew it well. The world slowed and she felt as though she was the one under water, unable to breathe, or scream. The sounds around her became muted, disassociated with reality.

"Oh my God," she breathed, sitting down hard on the ground as the car finally emerged from its watery grave. She felt haunted by a moment a million lifetimes ago, when she had sat in the front seat of that car.

"Kerry? Kerry are you okay?" The words were at a distance and inaudible over the roar in her ears. Luke finally touched her shoulder and she jumped. "Are you ok," he asked again.

"Get your father," she begged.

"Dad's busy," Luke responded uncertainly.

"Get him," Kerry snapped, swaying to her feet and turning away from him. She took one step towards the car and stopped. She couldn't look. She took another step, realizing that she was going to have to.

"Kerry?" Police Chief Atherton asked, placing a hand on her arm. Unlike his son, he didn't question her motives for calling him over. Hovering behind him with a worried look on his face was Dr. Roberts. "What is it?"

"The car—" she croaked, unable to finish the sentence. She could feel the tears gathering in the back of her throat. "It's Ethan. Ethan Bryne."

Chapter Text

"No," Kerry said sharply, "I told you before that I didn't know what happened to Ethan after I was locked in that room in the basement."

"Let's go over this again," Chief Atherton said, not unkindly. "Your father wasn't there to pick you up."

Kerry sighed, picking up the bottle of water placed before her on the scarred table. The meeting was informally held inside the Chief's office, but it may as well be in interrogation room one where they had first questioned her eight years ago. Kerry could still feel the squeeze on her heart when she realized who the car belonged to, where for one incredibly foolish moment she had thought he was the skeleton they were still drudging for pieces of in the silt at the bottom of the vehicle. As much as she wanted to deny it, the experience made her realize she still had feelings for him.

It wasn't love – that was what she currently had with Luke – but it wasn't the hate she had become so familiar with either. It was a strange caring that was born out of history together, and it didn't bother Kerry as much as she thought it would to realize that this probably meant she was finally over Michel. In a way, she was relieved to find he didn't warrent such strong emotions from her anymore.

"Dad wasn't there to pick me up. It was a Friday night, and he had made it a habit to be on time in those days, but he was usually early on Fridays because he thought that downtown after dark was filled with drunks and freaks on weekends. I guess he was probably right in this case, huh? Anyway, so I noticed right away that he wasn't there and tried to contact him. Then I practically knocked over Ethan as he was leaving with groceries. He offered me a drive and I accepted." Kerry took a drink of water, and then lowered the bottle with a grin. "I had a little crush on him at the time. He was a nice guy. It's too bad he's dead."

"What happened next?"

Anyone else might have been nervous about recounting a lie to the cops, especially someone who had such a close relationship to one like Kerry did, but it had never phased her to tell the story as it wasn't. At first, she had done so because of her feelings for Michel: sixteen year old Kerry had been so in love she was willing to perjure herself in order to allow him time to get away. Now, she certainly didn't have any ties to him, especially since it was becoming increasingly obvious that he had killed someone in his place. What she did have was decent survival instincts telling her she couldn't change her story now and a steel-trap memory for everything that happened concerning him.

Just in case, she had stopped at home between leaving the riverside and coming into the police station for an interview. She had kept a journal of every lie she had told in story format so that it read like true events. It was only a simple matter of flipping through it to get the basics. Even Chief Atherton didn't expect her to remember every small detail of something which had happened almost a decade ago.

"Hmm," Kerry responded. "We were walking towards the car, and I think we were flirting a little. He opened the door for me and I got in, he placed his groceries behind me, and as he was walking around to his side of the car Marsala walked up. I can't speak for Ethan, but I noticed him approaching and didn't think anything about it. He didn't look nervous or anything. He just looked like some guy who was out of milk or something. Anyway, instead of walking in front of the car like I expected, he pulled out a gun on Ethan and yelled "Get in the car!"

"Did he?"

It was on the tip of Kerry's tongue to say "you know he didn't" but she managed to keep her mouth shut. "No," she said tersely. "He didn't. He tried to struggle with Marsala for the gun. It went off. Suddenly there was blood splattered over the driver's window and Marsala was pushing Ethan into the back seat. I still don't know how no one heard the shot. You would think someone would have heard it, wouldn't you? It was so loud." Kerry placed her head on her upraised palms, covering her eyes with her fingers. "Or maybe I'm remembering the other shot."

"What happened to Ethan?" the Chief asked gently, putting her back on track.

"He was clutching his stomach," she said quietly, suddenly realizing that if anything ruined her story it would be this detail. She couldn't take it back now – the stomach had been the place she had claimed Ethan Bryne had been shot eight years before. If there wasn't evidence of a gun wound there, or worse, evidence that had the bullet in his leg or somewhere else, it definitely wouldn't look good for her. "There was blood coating his fingers and he kept making this horrible gulping noise. I still hear it sometimes. He looked at me, and he told me to run, but it was far far too late for that. Marsala was already climbing into the driver's seat and the gun was pointed at me. He told me not to make a sound or he'd shoot me, and there was nothing he would like more than to rid the world of vermin like me. I did what he said. I was too scared to even move. And on some point during the drive I passed out. The next thing I know, I was waking up in that room in the basement room that was my cell for almost two days."

"And Ethan," Kerry continued, correctly interpreting the impatient flicker in Atherton's eyes as one more detail she would have to say out loud for the record. "Ethan was gone. I don't know what happened to him."

"Thank you Kerry," Atherton said, pinching the bridge of his nose. "I'll let you know if we can finally put the poor boy to rest."

"I do know one thing, Chief," Kerry said, standing with her purse clasped in her hand. "Ethan Bryne did not deserve to die because of me. He barely knew me, and yet he could tell I was upset enough to need a drive home and then he died trying to save my life. That was the kind of guy Ethan Bryne was, and I think he deserves a little recognition for being a hero."

Atherton sighed, looking much older than he had eight years ago when they finished an interview very similar to this one. "I'll see what I can do, Miss Nowicki."

Kerry left the police station feeling slightly dazed at everything she had said. For a while she had actually believed the story she was telling, and she actually felt guilty for Ethan's death. None of it had felt like a lie because she could see it in front of her as though it had really happened. She could see the blood pouring from beneath Ethan's hands as he moaned, coating the back seat of the car. She could remember terror as Marsala pointed the gun at her, driving to his house. The terror had been so great, she had passed out.

In those moments she had recounted the story, it had happened.

Or maybe she was just telling herself that in order to swallow the idea she had lied to the cops again more palatable.

She crossed the street, her mud-covered heels clipping on the solid pavement. Kerry waved to the person driving the car which had stopped to allow her to cross, and then jumped up on the curb and continued through the front door of the Tribune office. "Hey Gordon," she called out to the receptionist. "How's it shake-n-bakin'?"

"Ha ha, good one," he answered like he did every day, after she had learned that the knife scar along his thumb was from an unfortunate accident with a bag of just-add-chicken mix. "Gallant wants to see you ASAP."

"Oh?" Kerry answered, eyebrows winging up in feign surprise for the benefit of all the people who had stopped working and started to listen the moment she walked through the door. "I guess I'll go see what he wants. Is he in his office?"

"I suggest you don't bother stopping for coffee this time. He means ASAP unless you want to go AWOL."

Kerry turned and gave a mock salute as she continued towards her boss's office in the back of the ground floor. They referred to it as the fish tank due to the glass wall Gallant commonly left open in order to spy on all his underlings. For a bunch of people who wrote for a living, it was an incredibly uninspired name. As Kerry approached the office, she could feel the eyes on the back of her neck as her coworkers watched, and she could understand their interest. Being called into Gallant's office during midday hours was synonymous with doing the walk of shame. Kerry hadn't directly reported to him for very long, but up until a few weeks ago she had been one of the ones watching with barely concealed interest as her superiors were called to face Gallant.

Getting bawled out herself by the editor in chief was just one of the perks of her new position.

"You wanted to see me?" Kerry asked, sticking her head through the glass door. She didn't knock because Gallant thought knocking was a sign of timidity, especially since everyone knew he was watching them approach through the walls.

"Get in here and close the door."

"Yessir," Kerry said, closing the door behind her and observing her boss. He was a small man with a gruff voice which matched his attitude. To new employees, it was a mystery why everyone feared him due to the fairness and joviality he showed in day-to-day life as well as the computer-nerd appearance his glasses and pocket protector gave him. Kerry hadn't been fooled for a second back then, and after she had seen the way he blew up Editorials for typoing a local businessman's name, Kerry had her proof that Gallant was not a man to mess with.

Instead of speaking, he threw a file onto his pristine desk. Notes and pictures tumbled out, the one on top depicting her at age sixteen sitting in the back of a police car. She couldn't remember the picture being taken, but she knew the exact moment it had captured. She had led the police back to Marsala's house and they had let her stay in the back of the car for warmth while they investigated the scene. She had never been arrested, and she knew that since she was a minor at the time that no pictures could run in the paper about her.

What she hadn't known was that they had something so juicy that made her seem like a murderous criminal.

Kerry raised an eyebrow, trying not to allow her boss to see her surprised reaction. "So this is about Ethan Bryne?"

"Of course it's about Bryne! Dammit girl, we're sitting on a goldmine here. Did you even think to tell me that you knew the victim? How did you think I was going to take it when I called for the file on this boy and found a picture of one of my reporters staring up at me from a cop car? Did you think I enjoyed hearing that you weren't in the office because you were being questioned by the police?"

"I'm not guilty of anything!" Kerry retorted, finally flustered. "I didn't kill him. I just identified the car before they tracked down the license and registration, and then I had to give a statement."

Gallant looked at her as though she were insane. "I know you didn't kill him. What I mean is – do you think I'm happy to learn that one of my reporters had an inside connection to a story and didn't contact me with information immediately? You've wasted valuable writing time."

Kerry was tempted to apologize for reacting like a human to the situation when she realized that despite everything, all her connections to the vehicle and the person supposedly dead inside, that she had been right in the beginning: this was the story of the year, and she had already blown it. "Who did you put on it?"

Gallant snorted in disgust. "You. Do you think I'd give up the personal angle just because you decided to go play footsies with your boyfriend for an hour over at cop central? So get your ass out of my office and go make me a rough draft."

Kerry moved automatically, feeling a bit shell-shocked. She couldn't base the future of her career on a bunch of lies, could she? She was too close to the story. She couldn't be objective. Surely Gallant wanted something more than sentimental drivel.

Unless he thought that a heart-felt eulogy written by someone who survived the same ordeal would sell more papers.

Ethan Bryne was a hero, she typed out as the first line of her story once reaching her desk.

.x.x.x.

"Doctor Roberts?" Kerry called out, her heels clicking ominously against the tiled floor of the morgue. The air was chilled, the atmosphere was dim and slightly dusty, both giving credence to the slightly creepy feeling she always experienced in this building. When the doctor didn't respond to her call, Kerry stepping into the room where the autopsies were performed. The minute she opened the heavy doors, Kerry could hear Bon Jovi playing from the stereo system and she knew that it probably meant the doctor was thinking about something. Roberts was bent over the examining table, a magnifying glass held over the rib bones with a concerned frown on his face. "Is something wrong?" she asked, slightly breathless with anxiety.

"Oh, Kerry!" Doctor Roberts exclaimed with surprise as he straightened. "You haven't snuck up on me for so long I wasn't expecting it. Don't know why, though, considering that this is our boy."

"Yeah," she said, grabbing a wooden chair from the wall and dragging it towards the examining table. She straddled it and looked down at the bones with interest. A lot of the smaller ones were missing, along with the right tibia and a finger on his left hand. All in all, the reassembled skeleton wasn't in too bad a shape, all things considered. "What's going on?"

"See here? This knick in the rib bone? This is where the bullet entered. And over here, do you see this gouge in the vertebra? That's where it ricocheted back into his left lung. The poor boy was probably in excruciating pain before he died. With a wound like this, it's possible he died before you even reached Marsala's house."

"Could he have survived, though, if Marsala had just taken him to the hospital?" Kerry asked, thinking it rather perverse that she needed to know. Would whoever this body belonged to have survived if Michel hadn't shot him and dumped him in a river? Probably.

"Maybe. With only the bones to work with I can only give you a rough trajectory and an estimate of how he died. A person can survive a stomach wound like this. The lung is another matter, but there's a possibility he could have lived. But Kerry, you know there's a possibility that a good majority of the people who come through here could have survived but didn't. You can't look at it that way."

"I know," Kerry responded, frowning slightly as she looked at the body. "It just makes me angry that his death if my fault. Aaah, before you say it," she interrupted Dr. Roberts quickly before he had a chance to argue with her. "I know that I wasn't the one who pulled the trigger and shot him, but that doesn't make me feel better."

"Yes, well," Dr. Roberts said awkwardly, rearranging the safety glasses covering his eyes as he put down the bone in his hand. "About that. I did mean to ask you how you were. Terrible shock this morning, terrible."

Kerry shrugged, unable to look in the doctor's eyes. She found she couldn't lie to him anymore when faced with his direct and genuine concern for her. She couldn't tell him that her delight over getting a major by-line in the paper almost completely overshadowed her empathy at this poor, unknown sop that Michel had killed to cover up the whole story. She couldn't tell him that the guilt she felt was half because she was relieved that this wasn't Ethan Bryne, or worse, Kerry Nowicki lying dead on the slab. "I'll be fine," she muttered, turning her attention back to the bones. "Have you positively identified him yet?"

"The dental records were faxed in just before you arrived. Let me check."

As Dr. Roberts efficiently checked the teeth for a match, Kerry waited with bated breath. She could feel the nervousness tingle at the base of her spine as she looked at the strange bones. Whether or not the teeth matched, and corroborated her story, all depended on Michel's efficiency at cleaning up after himself. Once upon a time, she would have absolute faith in him, and it didn't surprise her to realize that though her faith was damaged and dented, she still believed that he was one of the best at covering his tracks and staying alive.

"This is Ethan Bryne," Roberts said. "The poor boy can be put to rest now."

"Yeah," Kerry responded mournfully. She also had a newspaper article that needed to be put the rest. "You'll let me know when you've signed off on the cause of death?" she asked, almost amused as the doctor nodded absentmindedly, his nose already back among the bones.

Back at her desk in the newspaper office, Kerry flipped through the pictures from the original file. Most of them were of her, looking worn and exhausted beyond her sixteen years, and yet vulnerable at the same time. Some she was behind police tape at Marsala's house as she explained to them what had happened, and others she was reunited with her family after their ordeal. That one had been published in the newspaper.

After the pictures of the aftermath there was a grainy shot of a boy with brown hair, and she stared at it for similarities with Michel. The blurred shot didn't show any of his features in detail, and it could be just about any teenage boy, taken at any time. It didn't show his arresting face, or self-sure grin, or the confident way he stood.

The final picture did, and her stomach flopped over as she took in the way he had his arm carelessly slung over a nameless girl's shoulder, a beer-bottle draped carefully between two fingers. He was wearing the white Brockport SUNY sweater she had first seen him wearing, and as she made a note to the editor to crop out the girl and run the picture, Kerry couldn't shake the idea that she was somehow betraying him by putting his image in print. "My name's Ethan Bryne. When you get out of this, tell the police –"

God, he had played her, even from that first moment and definitely up to the last. With a burst of indignant anger, she signed off on the article and left, not looking back with any sort of regret.

x.x.x

Kerry unlocked the door to her apartment, suddenly feeling exhausted, as though the weight of the day had finally worn her to the ground. She just wanted to take a relaxing bath and maybe snuggle up with her boyfriend over a fun movie on television. She didn't think she could stand being alone with both her thoughts and her memories swirling in the forefront of her brain today.

"Hey babe," Luke said, giving her a quick peck on the cheek, not bringing up the body in the water, or the way she freaked out at it. He didn't ask how she was, and se appreciated it. "It's take-out night. I was thinking Chinese." He gave her a hopeful look, knowing that though she loved the taste of the food from the local take-out place, it rarely ever loved her.

"Sure," Kerry grinned back, returning the soft kiss. "Just so long as you're willing to ignore any unseemly bathroom sounds. Why don't you order? I have a quick call to make." She grabbed her BlackBerry, heading into their bedroom for privacy.

Luke shot her a suspicious look. "Ok, but don't take too long. You know how I feel about work interfering with take-out night."

"It's just one, short call," Kerry promised, backing into the bedroom with a reassuring smile. Once the door was closed behind her, she wiped the fake expression off her face and sighed, feeling a stress headache coming on. It had been a long day. The number she needed was listed under 'pianist' in her directory of work informants, and she pressed the talk button with a fist squeezing her heart. It had been a while, she realized. The number might not even be valid anymore.

"Hello?" His voice was the same as it had ever been and always would be – smooth and sexy, but a little rough when he was angry or sarcastic. She felt like a teenage girl again listening to it and the clench on her heart tightened.

"They pulled Ethan Bryne's car out of the swamp today," she said without preamble, careful not to link it back to him. She didn't mention the car was his, her reporter instincts warring against her general suspicion of the world. Ears were everywhere, both beyond the door into her living room and also possibly on his end. On her more paranoid days, she might even wonder if someone else was listening in on either of their phones, and today was shaping up to be one of those days.

He was silent for a moment. "They were bound to find it at some point."

"There was a body," she informed him – accused him.

"Was there something you wanted?" He asked. "I'm a busy man."

"Naturally my boss took the opportunity to put me in charge of the story—"

"Naturally," he mocked.

"And I thought you would like to know they'll be running Ethan's picture in the morning news. We pulled the one we had on file from when he went missing." They'll be running your picture, she was really saying. It may complicate things for you.

"You shouldn't have called." A sigh. "But thank you. You'll make sure Ethan's article accurately represents the facts?" You'll make sure no one digs too deep into this and comes up with information I'll have to kill them for, she translated.

"I'm on it." She hung up before he could, the vise on her heart had moved painfully to her stomach. There was a time, she thought, when she would have melted at his voice over the phone and kept him talking as long as possible. Those days were over. She was no longer sixteen and she no longer thought of Ethan Bryne.

But as she stood, knees slightly trembling – she had been on her feet all day, after all – Kerry realized her stomach wasn't really up for Chinese tonight.

Chapter Text

I was sitting in the common room of my dorm house, banished from my room by a horny roommate and her twenty five year old boyfriend with the mental capacity of a six year old. It was immediately evident to me that this guy was going no where, hinted at by the fact that he was seven years older than we were and his best option of getting laid was in a shared bedroom with single beds. Mom and dad must not like overnight company. I had watched television for a while, but after midnight I started to become concerned by the idea that the noise might wake someone up. I wasn't usually considerate, but living with thirty other majorly stressed out students who would throw textbooks and cruel snipes when crossed gave new perspective to a girl.

I was looking out the window when he entered the room, all swagger of the recently laid. I stared at him for a moment, mouth opened wide, and he stared back at me.

"Well, well," he said with a smirk, sitting beside me. "If it isn't little Miss Kerry Nowicki."

"And apparently the big bad wolf."

His smirk got more mocking. "And what are you doing in this neck of the woods, little girl?"

"I live in this neck of the woods. You remember what that means, right? Living?" I sniped. It must have been the 'little miss' and 'little girl', or maybe just the stress that made up my life. He was lucky no textbooks were at hand.

"Ooooh, ouch," he complained, putting a hand over his slowly beating heart. "That hits me right here."

"You still have a heart?"

"Betray any men you think you're in love with recently? Maybe that's why you're still a virgin." He smirked again. This verbal one-upmanship was getting out of control. I wanted to wipe that smirk off his face.

And that's why I kissed him, getting my hands into his luscious long dark hair and anchoring both of us in place. My lips were demanding against his, forcing him to open his mouth so my tongue could explore his, teasing along the points of his teeth with tantalizing strokes that elicited a moan as he forced me back against the hard wooden arm of the cheap dorm couch. I didn't notice. He tasted of cheap beer and mints and the underlying tang of another woman's blood. His hand stroked over my breast and I pushed up against him, moving us both back into a sitting position. I straddled his hips, gently biting his tongue as I rubbed myself against him.

"Maybe," he hissed later as I rode him. "Not a virgin anymore."

And all I had wanted was to get him to stop smirking at me.

x.x.x

Kerry sat at her desk in the morning, staring at the picture of Michel she hadn't put back into the newspaper folder, and then the storage archives, yet. Nelle was sometimes right, Kerry mused, if she had cleaned her desk the night before, she wouldn't have been subjected to his pretty face so early in the morning. She knew that for the next twenty four hours he would be smiling at her everywhere, as he was plastered on the front page of the Tribune. That image was grainy; the original was a candid shot of him talking to a girl taken before digital cameras became the norm so that the date stamp was across the bottom corner. It had been taken six months before they met.

It didn't seem odd that he looked exactly the same here as he had when she had met him, and yet at the same time she was thrown by the SUNY Brockport sweater he had on. It brought back all the emotions she felt when she first saw him: terror, inquisitiveness, and a surprising rush of attraction. She also felt affection for him, looking so normal and candid in the shot, not knowing that it would be forever immortalized in print for thousands to see. The only favour she could do for him was to make sure it didn't end up online, at least as far as she could control something like that.

"Is that Ethan Bryne?" Nelle asked, looking over Kerry's shoulder. "It's a shame; he would have been such a good looking man."

For a flash of a moment, Kerry felt anger for Michel. "He's good looking here," Kerry defended, shaking the picture for emphasis.

"Good looking?" Nelle leered. "Heck, look at those shoulders and that grin. He's a definite ten, if a little young for my current tastes. He was probably amazing in bed, unless he's one of those guys who thinks that because he's hot he doesn't have to work for it." Nelle looked at the picture suspiciously.

"Oh God no," Kerry breathed. "He was at least a twelve."

Nelle gave her an odd, piercing look. "You're being oddly generous. You've only ever given Luke a nine, and that was because he accidentally did that thing that one time with the—"

Kerry blushed, grabbing the picture of Michel away from Nelle's prying fingers. "I'm being considerate to the fact he can no longer prove himself worthy."

"Nah uh, girl. You're totally speaking from the voice of experience. Is he the one?"

Kerry gave Nelle a wide-eyed look of surprise. "The one?"

"Yeah. The one who popped your cherry, who you lost your virginity to, you know, the first."

"Sure," Kerry said sarcastically. "He was the best sex of my life."

Nelle tapped her finger against her lip as though she were thinking of something. "I thought college-boy was the best sex of your life."

The irony that they were actually talking about the same person wasn't lost on Kerry. "He was. Now will you let me get to work?"

.x.x.x.

"Go long," Kerry gestured with one hand, directing Luke to step backwards a few feet. He complied with a sceptical look on his face, not moving as far as he would have if she were one of his guy friends. The feminist in Kerry bristled at the realization he thought she was weaker than Kevin, or Joe, or whatever other great American football player he tossed the ball around with on weekends, but the realistic side of her realized that there was no way she was making the throw at the current distance between them.

Kerry tried anyway. The football arched through the air, missing her target by a meter and ricocheting off the ground, bouncing into Luke's stomach. He grunted, curling his arms around the ball to catch it. Kerry was eighty-five percent sure she didn't throw hard enough to leave a bruise, let alone really hurt him.

"I'll get you for that!" Luke threatened with a grin on his face as he held the ball in one hand and pointed it at her. "You're in trouble now."

Kerry took a step back, knowing that he could throw way harder than her. Her back hit against the low hanging branches of park foliage behind her, and she was so startled by the sudden sensation of what felt like fingers running across her back, she almost jumped. Distracted, she didn't see the ball coming towards her until it was soaring over her head. Kerry made a cursory attempt to catch it, jumping half-assed into the air with her arms stretched above her head, but she missed completely. Somewhere in the trees behind her, the ball crashed through leaves and came to a stop. Kerry looked behind her and then turned to Luke with a sheepish look on her face. "Did you really expect me to catch that?" she asked.

He smirked.

Kerry took that as a no, figuring that at least she had good reason not to make the catch: Luke had thrown something which was almost impossible for her to reach in time, unless she had been star quarterback in high school like he had been. "I'll get you back for that," Kerry threatened, causing his grin to get wider.

She turned her back on him, unable to watch the way his mouth taunted her. Facing the brush in the park, she hesitated before taking a step in, her eyes scanning the woods for spiders. Dusk was breaking in the open area of the park, but among the trees it was pitch black as night. Kerry inhaled, strangely afraid to step out of the safety of the wide open space and into a place that looked like it could hide more than mere spiders. She took a quick glance back at Luke and sucked up her reluctance, stepping into the woods with her eyes strained for the ball.

Kerry managed to wander a few meters in, her phone clutched in her hand with the display light shining the way. She couldn't find the darn football. A branch brushed against the back of her neck and she stifled a shriek, berating herself for being such a wuss. There was some feeling she couldn't identify warning her away. Her intuition was screaming danger and she couldn't shake the idea she was being watched. "I can't find it!" she called out to Luke, knowing he was still in earshot though she had lost sight of him steps ago.

Freezing, Kerry listened to the noises around her. She wasn't imagining it: leaves had definitely rustled unnaturally from somewhere on her right.

"Luke?" Kerry called out.

"Right here babe," he responded from the left, branches parting as he joined her. The noise of his approach completely overshadowed the small noise she had heard from the opposite direction. "I found the ball."

"Great," Kerry said, looping her hand through his strong arm and smiling. "I was just about to suggest we leave it here overnight and come find it tomorrow once the light returns."

"Naw," he said as he held a branch aside for her. Kerry stepped back into the field, noting that it was full night now and that the overhead lamps illuminated the heavily used paths. She moved towards the parked car, unwittingly staring back into the woods as she walked. Something, she felt, was still there.

x.x.x

I emerged from the campus library later than I intended, taking the quickest route back to my dorm. It cut through a wooded area that was completely charming in the daylight but at night it was a breeding ground for students getting laid away from the prying eyes of their roommates, and druggies taking a quick toke or buying a baggie of the newest uppers. I've been going to this school for almost two years and I had never heard of any accounts of people getting attacked in the area, but there was a first time for everything.

Naturally, I was tense to be in a badly lit area with the possibility of someone crazed on drugs attacking me, but there was no way I was taking the long way around. In about five minutes I had a date with a guy, a normal college student who worked in the library part time and sometimes tucked his shirt into his pants. There was no way I was missing a chance to experience what it was like to actually go on a date with someone who was alive. Michel, the last guy I had "dated" had only been good for a quick fuck, and though I hadn't seen him in months, he was always on my mind.

I started as bushes rustles on my left. Immediately, I curled my fingers around my phone, not for the purpose of calling someone, which might actually be the smartest thing I could do at the moment, but instead to give some strength behind my fist. My self defence instructor had always said that if you were going to punch someone, you better do it as forcefully as possible in the first try because you might not get a second chance. I was pretty confident I could take whoever it was, even if the chances were good I was about to stumble over a couple emerging from the trees with moss in their hair.

I was wrong. If I hadn't been carefully listening to my surroundings I never would have noticed as someone stepped behind me. It wasn't much warning before a hand clamped around my shoulder, turning me around so that I stumbled. I tried to drag my hand out of my jacket pocket but it got caught on the flap. I ripped it free, swinging with as much strength as I had.

"Whoa!" he exclaimed, stepping backwards quicker than the human eye could comprehend. Strangely enough, this made me relax and shove my phone back in my pocket. The relief was not long-lived, however, because shortly after I became furious.

"What are you doing here?" I hissed, shoving both my hands into the pockets of my jacket and staring at him hostilely. I couldn't see his features in the bad light, and though his silhouette was familiar, I didn't even need that to confirm his identity. I recognised his voice.

He didn't answer me, just bridged the distance between us and kissed me, his mouth almost violent against mine. It was barely a kiss, more like a duel of wills as I battled to stay away from him: I don't know what it was he was fighting for. "Stop it!" I exclaimed, finally breaking away from him. "I have a date tonight. He's a nice guy." I don't know why I had to qualify it like that, but I couldn't look at him as I turned my back and walked away. I didn't get two steps before he grabbed my wrist and twirled me back towards him, his eyes searing into mine even in the dark. My breath caught in my throat as his fingers skimmed down my cheek, barely brushing against the pulse in my throat.

He kissed me again, more gently this time and I didn't pull away. He backed me against a nearby tree with surety in his movements. I knew he could see everything from the way my chest moved as I breathed heavily to the pounding pulse in my throat. My fingers curled through his thick hair as I pushed my tongue back against his, feeling warmth pool in my stomach. It wasn't just the buzz of sexual attraction like I've read about in romance novels, but a warmth of feeling and longing that entrapped my heart and wormed tendrils into my soul. This was why I needed to be away from him: I knew that if we continued the way we were, I would never be able to move away. It was possibly too late already.

Michel's nimble fingers unfastened the buttons of my jacket, pushing the heavy cotton out of the way and spreading his hand across my breast. My breath caught in the back of my throat and I pulled him closer, pressing myself against him wantonly. I didn't care if I had somewhere I needed to be, or things to do, or if I promised myself to stay away from him. I needed to feel him again, like a junkie needs a fix, and my hands trembled with withdrawal symptoms and my need to touch him. I wanted so badly to see him, his sensual lips and darkly lashed eyes always gave me a pause, as I never quite imagined them to be as beautiful as they really were, somehow convincing myself I had it wrong.

His mouth was surprisingly warm against my neck and I realized that in contrast to the cool autumn air, he was maintaining warmth from something. Possibly a heated building, or, as my traitorous brain pointed out, the lips of another girl. Somehow, the idea that he would come seek me out directly afterwards gave me a strange pleasure that shivered down my spine.

"Michel," I murmured. "Why?"

"Why not?" he reasoned back, moulding himself against me and pushing my back harder against the rough bark of the tree. I sighed as his cold hand slipped beneath my shirt, teasing my skin as his deft fingers snapped open the button of my jeans. Michel's mouth was still warm against mine, pressing and nipping insistently until I pushed my tongue back against his lips and felt him smile briefly in the kiss. His long, multi-talented fingers stroked against my clit, almost unexpectedly, and I gasped against his mouth. His smile grew wider for the briefest of moments. "Wouldn't your room be better for this?" he asked finally, nonchalantly.

I was in the process of nodding, my leg twined around the back of his thigh when I realized the implications of the question. Realized what would be waiting for us back at my dorm room. Realized, with a horribly kind of clarity, that he had trapped me with shocking deliberateness and cruelty. He knew I had a date, but would be unable to deny him anything, including showing up to meet the other boy with tree bark stuck in my hair and a vampire's hand curled in mine. "No, here," I insisted.

He drew back and observed me for a moment with a closed expression on his face. "Your call," he shrugged, leaning forward to kiss me again.

x.x.x

The alarm clock went off suddenly and Kerry was dragged from her dream by the haunting cords of some pop-princess song. Haunting because she would be hearing it in her head all day, not because there was anything particularly alluring or emotional about the words or sound. She groaned and rolled out of her side of the bed, trying her best not to disrupt Luke as she headed for the shower. By the time she finished her morning routine, he had gotten up and put on coffee, kissing her and handing her a cup as she emerged from the bathroom.

"Thanks," Kerry mumbled, inhaling deeply and relishing the scent of caffeine but also the simplicity of the act of Luke making it for her. In her previous relationships, she had never experienced waking up next to her partner in the morning without the demand for her to do anything. She took a moment to just appreciate the peace and contentment this new lifestyle brought her before she finished getting ready and gathered her notes from the table by the door where she had left them the night before.

"Love you! Later!" Kerry called out to Luke as she headed into work early, her deadline creeping up on a few assignments she hadn't been paying as much attention to as she should have in the past few days. There was something about the Ethan Bryne case that she just couldn't let go, and she wasn't sure if it was her surety that Michel had killed some innocent bystander in order to facilitate his own get-away, likely assuming the body would have been found years ago, or if there was something else. Something she was missing. Kerry kept thinking that if she wasn't so close to the subject matter that the elusive piece would jump right out at her and be the most obvious thing in the world.

Her drive to the newspaper office was filled with such worries, and when it came right down to it, her day wasn't much different from the last, despite her good intentions to work on other things. The hours she spent forcing herself off the Bryne case helped appease her boss, but only served to make her more determined to solve the mystery and finally put Ethan Bryne behind her.

x.x.x

"Hey Roberts, do you have an official cause of death on Ethan Bryne yet?" Kerry asked, casually walking into the city morgue as though there was nothing wrong with a reporter questioning the medical examiner as he prodded on another body.

"Probably drowned," Roberts said offhand, "but there's a possibility his body was dead before he was dumped. I haven't finished with him yet."

"It's been a week!" Kerry exclaimed, a flash of anger coursing through her at his callousness. "And there's no statute of limitations on murder."

"You've been watching too much CSI," the M.E. casually commented, arms elbow-deep in his patient's stomach. "In reality, this poor sucker on my table died two days ago and your Ethan has been dead for eight years. It isn't even a cold case. The case was solved a long time ago; they just didn't have the body."

"You've had his remains for a week," Kerry repeated.

Roberts paused what he was doing, his eyes softening as he regarded her for a moment. "I understand your need for resolution, but the hard truth is that Bryne is nothing more than a few bones, and the best I could tell from them is that his skull was intact when he went in the water. Now come over here for a second and I'll show you what's been taking up most of my brainpower recently."

Kerry inched around the examining table, carefully trying not to touch any of the instruments, not just because of the creepy autopsy factor, but because she had once poked a finger at a scalpel and not only sliced it open, but also made Roberts curse at her for having to disinfect the entire tray again. The body, displayed so clinically on the metal slab, seemed almost unhuman under the sharp glow of lights. The skin was white as chalk and the angry, gnashed neck wound was a surprising pink. "The bear attack victim? I heard about it."

"Bear attack? Oh, right. That's where it gets weird. It shares characteristics with a body in here earlier this week, but it's far more brutal than the first one."

"The first one?" Kerry quizzed, certain she hadn't heard about any animal attacks in recent days. Sure, her mind was preoccupied, but she was positive that something that newsworthy would have been on her radar.

"Peter Anderson. Found dead in his bed about a day after your boy came in. I ruled it as a cardiac arrest, but noticed a distinct lack of blood in his system."

"And this one?" she asked, nodding towards the body. Her mouth was dry, and her heart racing. She knew what his answer was before he said anything, and she sincerely hoped that all her assumptions were wrong.

"He ensanguinated."

"What? Bled out?" Kerry asked. "Well he does have that nasty bite missing from his neck." Oh, shit, she realized. It was getting more and more likely that this was not a normal animal attack.

"The weird part is that he lost way more blood than was found at the crime scene. The human body has around eight pints of blood, and six were missing."

"Six?" Kerry echoed dully, long-ago spoken words whispering through her mind. Vampires only take about a pint of blood when they feed, Ethan had said, but there are times... Kerry shuddered, her eyes drawn to the storage fridge where the body of Ethan Bryne was held. Rationally, she knew it wasn't the same person who had explained vampire feeding habits all those years ago, but she could still feel a tenuous connection between the bones and the man she now knew as Michel. Drawing back into reality, she found Roberts watching her intently, a questioning look on his face. "Was the body moved," she finally asked.

"Not that I've found evidence of. The bite radius is getting me too. It's almost human, but no human I know has teeth that can rip through the muscle of a man's neck."

Kerry looked back down at the body. It was not her first autopsy and it wouldn't be her last, but there was something disarmingly brutal about the Y incision on this one, as though the vampire had ripped his hands through the man's body. There were things she had trained herself not to look at while in the morgue, coping mechanisms that allowed her to ask Roberts questions as he worked. The stark reality flooded her vision, and for a moment she thought she was going to vomit.

"Not on the body," Roberts commented, having almost as much experience with the green tinge of her skin as he had with weighing hearts.

"I've got to go," Kerry said quickly, backing away from the table. "Give Alice my best." Her back hit the counter, shaking the contents of the glass cabinet with the bump. Kerry bolted from the room, only stopping once she reached the daylight brightness of the parking lot. She calmed a bit, feeling the warmth of the rays hit her face. It hadn't been disgust of the body that made her want to throw up, she realized. It had been fear, and it still swirled and eddied through her stomach like a deflating balloon someone had let go of.

Kerry leaned against the hood of her car, soaking up the daylight. She could still hear Ethan's voice telling her: "Without taking blood, the vampire becomes unable to think of anything besides his all-consuming need, which just grows and grows until eventually he loses what you humans would so arrogantly term 'his humanity.' He becomes like a beast, tearing unthinkingly into the first available victim, and doesn't even recognize until too late if the victim should be his own parent or child or lover... even with a steady diet of blood, too long between kills and the vampire becomes mentally and physically sluggish. It's more than the nourishment, it's the draining of the life force. Besides, killing is very pleasurable." She was still trembling, and despite the fact it was day, she had to suppress the urge to look over her shoulder.

She didn't even notice taking her BlackBerry out of her purse or searching the directory for the Pianist listing. She did notice his voice on the other end of the line telling her to leave a message. Kerry paused for a moment, the first few seconds of her message silence, or with his ears the nervous intake of breath. "Hey, it's me again. I just got out of the morgue and there's a body here that I think needs to be brought to your attention. I know it's not your problem, but it's the second one in a week and I didn't have any other contacts to call. Whoever did this is... crazy and bloodthirsty." Kerry paused, and then said softly, "goodbye."

She knew he'd understand the hidden context.

Chapter Text

After her day at work, Kerry was exhausted. She was tired of asking questions, especially those she didn't want the answers to, and she was even more tired of the fabricated expression of normalcy plastered on her face. She just wanted to metaphorically let her hair down for a while and get through a few hours in a state of apprehension. She had a right to be worried, dammit, especially if there was some rogue vampire running around the limited streets of Brockport. If the body count began to rise, unwanted attention would suddenly be focused on the town.

What was worse, she thought, was the randomness of the victims. She had family and loved ones living in Brockport, and no one was safe.

Kerry parked her car in her spot in the parking lot, looking up at the twilight sky. She had raced the looming sunset home, unwilling to be outside after dark. Get a grip, she mentally criticized. There's fear and then there's melodrama, and she was definitely on the verge of hysteria. Maybe pretending everything was all right was actually the better option, because at least then she wasn't thinking about it.

Kerry climbed out of her car, grabbing her purse from the seat next to her and swinging it over her shoulder she made her way into the building. It was her night to cook supper she realized, climbing the stairs to her third floor flat.

"I'm home!" she called out after opening the front door and finding the light in the living room on. She dropped her purse on the hallway table, ignoring the new mail which had been stacked on top of the old mail. "I'm cooking supper," she broadcasted, stepping towards the kitchen. "Any requests?"

A noncommittal grunt came from the bedroom. Kerry grinned, grabbing a casserole dish out of the bottom cupboards and covering the bottom with rice, tossing other ingredients on top in a haphazard manner. She heard him approaching as she straightened from putting supper in the oven, though he tried to soften his footsteps to gain the element of surprise.

"Oh, tuna casserole." He grabbed her from behind, arms tightening around her waist in a hug as he buried his face against the crook of her neck. "You smell like," he started before getting a good whiff of her skin. It was a game between them for him to guess which of the similar-scented perfumes she was wearing. Sometimes, she would deliberately stop by the local pharmacy and spray on a sample of a perfume he hadn't encountered before. Today, she hadn't. "Euuh," he muttered, stretching out the sound of distaste.

Kerry snorted. "I stopped by the morgue today," she told him, turning in his embrace and slipping her arms around his neck. She could feel the heavy muscles in his shoulders bunch as he grabbed her and placed her on the counter. Kerry's mouth opened slightly as Luke kissed her, sighing against him. Finally, she felt safe for the first time since that afternoon.

"How was Dr. Roberts?" Luke asked, opening the cupboard above her head for a glass and moving away from her in order to pour a cup of water. He lounged against the fridge drinking, carrying on their conversation. He was freshly shaved, some time in the last hour, she guessed as she noticed his usual scruff wasn't present on his chin. It wasn't unusually for him to get rid of the five o'clock shadow, especially since the chief of the precinct, and his superior officer, also happened to be his father. Luke was part needy puppy, looking for affection and confirmation of his own manhood.

Sometimes, Kerry thought, it sucked to be him. At least she could separate the disappointment or disapproval from her boss from her father's very special form of guilt-trips.

"He was fine. A little stymied, but I guess a good puzzle is good for an M.E.. Keeps them on their toes," Kerry said breezily, not letting on to what she was thinking. There was an energy around him that she couldn't place, and she could tell he was bothered about something. The reporter in her made her want to pick at it, but the girlfriend who tried not to bring her work into the metaphorical bedroom realized that it was up to him to broach the subject, and if her instincts were right about anything, it was that he was attempting to do just that through smalltalk.

"What story were you working on?" he asked, grabbing an apple from the bowl on the counter and taking a loud, juicy bite.

"Supper's in fifteen minutes," Kerry huffed.

"I'm hungry now," he reasoned with his mouth full. "Was it the Ethan Bryne story? I thought you were finished with that."

Kerry didn't think she'd ever be finished with it, at least personally. Professionally it had already been laid to rest unless some mind-blowing event happened to catapult it back into the public eye. One of her current worries was how very possible that was right now, and the only one who could really do it was her. "It wasn't that," she told him. "I was just visiting the old man. Last time I saw him he reminded me that I haven't been stopping by lately."

"I don't know why you do," Luke said. "He's kind of creepy."

Kerry frowned, hopping down off the counter. "If it wasn't for him and your father, there's a good chance I would have been arrested eight years ago. It kind of makes a gal see the good in people when they help her avoid a murder charge."

"Oh, come on! The case wouldn't have gotten anywhere. Self defence cases rarely do. And that Marsala guy was psycho. Vampires!" Luke snorted.

"Yeah," Kerry said with her emotions concealed. "Psycho."

"I'm sorry I brought it up, babe. I just know how much it upsets you to see dead bodies after what happened. I'm just looking out for you."

"I know," Kerry said with a smile, but the truth was that dead bodies didn't make her uncomfortable. What made her uncomfortable was the idea that he thought that they should, as though anyone who had accidentally killed a man should feel guilty and uneasy around death. She must have missed that ethics class. She crossed over to him and gave him a quick kiss, grabbing the oven mitts from the top of the fridge behind them. She placed her hands into them, opening the door and peering into the stove. She knew that the casserole had a good ten minutes left to finish cooking, but she felt the need to do something useful.

Kerry took off the oven mitts, placing them on the top of the stove in a way which would be a fire hazard if she was using the burners. Standing on tip toe, she grabbed two cheap china plates from the cabinet above the sink and headed towards the dining table placed between the kitchen and the living room. It was large enough to uncomfortably fit four, and she had picked it up the year before at a garage sale.

"We're eating at the table?" Luke asked, trailing after her. Kerry stopped a foot from the table and he bumped into her back.

"Why is there folded laundry on it?" she asked, staring at the piles of folded shirts and socks.

"I was sorting," he said sheepishly. "I can clean it off if you want."

Kerry stared at the mess, and then looked at the plates in her hand. "No," she said. "It's ok. We'll just eat standing above the counter or on the couch like usual. I'll get some bowls instead."

"I'm sorry," Luke told her, giving her an embarrassed smile, already placing his neat stacks of bounty-fresh clothing in the laundry hamper. "I thought I'd have it done before you came home. I don't like sorting my clean laundry on the bed, especially when the sheets haven't been washed. It's like washing the floor and then drying it with a dirty rag."

Kerry wasn't sure why someone would dry the floor instead of letting it air dry, but that might be why hers always came out streaky. It didn't matter anymore because he was now finished cleaning off the table and was in the process of lugging the load back into the bedroom. She placed the plates in the middle of the table, grabbing two placemats to put in front of the positions. Relationships were about compromise, she knew, but she thought that even though she tried to give into his whims sometimes, someone had already trained him to see through that. It was probably his mother. It was amazing to find a boyfriend who read between the lines to the core of what she really wanted.

"It's been a while since we sat down across from each other for a meal," she called to Luke as she set the table. He answered something from the bedroom, but she was unable to hear him. By the time she finished setting the table for two and started making a salad from greenery in the fridge, he had emerged from the bedroom sans laundry.

"Is that stuff still good?" He asked, referring to the bag of ready-made salad she was currently picking the sludgy off-colored pieces out of.

"Sure it is," Kerry responded. "Only when you take a bite it doesn't crunch, you should probably spit it out."

Luke sighed. "I don't know what I'd do without you to create culinary miracles."

Kerry opened the fridge and looked at the cheese, wondering if she should put some in the salad to make Luke more likely to eat it, or if it would end up just being a waste of perfectly good cheese.

"Put some on top of the casserole too," Luke asked, grabbing Kerry on both sides of her waist and making her squeal. She hit him with the salad tongs as he laughed at her, swinging around to grab a bottle of sparkling water out of the fridge and pour it into wine glasses. Neither of them were into casual drinking, though Kerry was sure there was still some wine left over from her last birthday party. It was just one of the things they had in common.

Kerry watched Luke rearrange the utensils on the table, switching the fork to the left side. Kerry had a habit of setting the table beautifully, but accidentally placing everything in a mirror image of where it was supposed to go. His back was to her, and as she shredded cheese for both the salad and the casserole, she watched his broad shoulders and narrow hips as he moved. His masculinity always made her smile.

"See something you like?" he asked with a grin.

"You've got a great ass," she told him, swinging around to take the casserole out of the oven. She opened the dish, blinking as the steam rushed out over her face. Soon, supper was ready to be served and she presented the dish to Luke at the table, feeling a warm rush from the accomplishment of playing housewife successfully for one of the few times she bothered. She didn't stop to wonder whether she was doing this out of guilt because she had spoken to Michel, or because since he was a cop, she was about to circumnavigate his investigation.

The casserole hit her plate with a wet plop, and Kerry sat down to enjoy her meal, taking a sip of her drink. "How was your day at work?"

"It was fine. That'll change after tonight, but we'll get through it. By the end of the week you won't even notice the change."

"Why?" Kerry asked, scrunching her brow in confusion. "What's going on this week?"

Luke dropped his fork to his plate, surveying her carefully. "I thought you knew. I thought that's what supper was all about."

"Know what? Luke, come on. You know I can't just not get answers. I'll keep bugging you until we're both thoroughly annoyed and frustrated."

"I've been transferred to the night shift."

"Night shift," Kerry echoed dully, her ears roaring with the blood rushing to her head and the feeling of dread settled into her stomach as she stared at him in horror. Her boyfriend was going to be out there with the blood crazy vampire wandering the streets of Brockport. "No! You can't!" she thought out loud.

"I have to. I have no choice in the matter. In a month or so the job will rotate to someone else." He smiled gently at her, misinterpreting her worries. "It's not that big of a deal. We'll still see each other at the same times, only I'll be waking up when you go to bed and vice versa."

"But you won't be sleeping with me," she said in a quiet voice, playing along with his reasoning. That hadn't been what she was thinking at all. Kerry had been thinking that vampirism was going to take another man she loved. That one of these mornings she would wake up to the police chief knocking on the door to tell her that his son was dead. It was much easier for the vampire to gain access to those people who were still awake and out and about than it was those who were soundly sleeping in their beds, she thought. He was a goner.

Kerry got up from her seat and slipped onto Luke's lap, resting her head against his warm chest. His heart was strong and steady, and she hoped it kept that way. "When do you start?" she asked, tilting her head up for a kiss.

"In a few hours," he responded, pulling her closer against him.

As she idly drew circles against his broad chest, Kerry realized that it would be up to her to keep him safe. If she didn't hear back from Michel by sunrise tomorrow, she'd have to step in and keep Brockport protected like a modern, every-day superhero.

x.x.x.x.

Kerry sat in her car, hands tensed around the wheel at the three o'clock and nine o'clock positions. In front of her was Ethan Bryne's old house, the structure the same as it had ever been and the expansive lawn cleanly groomed. The trim was painted a new color and she thought the royal blue and white combination made it look like a china set, almost delicate in appearance. She had driven by twice since Ethan's body had been found – and, ok, she had stopped once and stared at the house until each turret was seared into her brain – but those visits had been out of nostalgia and grief, with no intention of knocking on the door. This time, however, she planned to visit if she could get the over the shaking knees and cold sweat of nerves first.

This is foolish, Kerry thought. Surely someone new was now living in his house: someone who wasn't a vampire, someone who would laugh her off the porch if she even suggested as much. What was even stupider was the fact she was planning to knock in the daytime, when vampires would be asleep. It wasn't even a very good test, because even if no one answered the door, it didn't mean humans didn't live there. They could be at work, or just not answering the door.

But there was no way Kerry was trying this after dark. She may be inquisitive, but she wasn't stupid. There was a rogue vampire going around and ripping into humans like a dieting housewife faced with a box of chocolate, and she wasn't going to take the chance of getting in its face. She could practically see a situation where she knocked on the door, only to come face to face with a blank-eyed zombie-vamp, its latest victim's blood coating its mouth as it didn't pause before lunging for her throat. With her luck, it would leave her half dead on the doorstep, struggling for breath. A nice little parting gift for Michel to clean up.

If it was still his house.

And if he cared enough to take care of it himself. Likely enough, he didn't.

Kerry inhaled sharply and exhaled, loosening her grasp on the steering wheel and banging the palms of her hands on it in a quick beat. Finally as confident as she'd ever be, Kerry swung the door to her car open and stood up in the driveway, shielding her eyes from the sun.

"Hello?" a voice asked from behind her.

Kerry turned sharply on her heel, noticing the woman standing behind her with a shopping bag in her arms. A car was parked in front of the house, the trunk open. "Oh," Kerry managed weakly, managing to be polite despite her surprise. "I'm sorry. I'm parked in your space. I'll move."

"Don't bother," the woman said with a friendly laugh. "I have a feeling that if you get back behind the wheel you won't find the courage to get out again. You'll just back out and keep going, and now I'm curious. Grab a bag of groceries and you have an invitation for something to drink."

Kerry blushed, hoping the bright light hid instead of highlighted the redness of her face. "Sure," she said, moving forward to grab the handles of the remaining canvas bags. It hadn't been that long since she had worked as a cashier in the grocery stores, but enough time had passed to see the growing trend of environment-healthy bags almost become a norm. She closed the trunk and followed the lady into the house, through the front hall and into the back kitchen. Kerry managed not to openly peruse the house, though her impression was that nothing had really changed. The wallpaper was still ancient with real gold inlay, the waxed banister on the staircase still gleamed, sweeping majestically down into the hallway, and Michel's piano was still set up in the same place it had always been.

"You've been here before," the woman noted, shoving a box of Pepsi cans into the fridge. "Most people take a pause when they first enter the house and gape or react in some way."

"I'm a... I mean, I was a friend of Ethan Bryne's." Kerry watched her companion as she said this, keeping her hands busy by removing the contents of one of the shopping bags.

"Ah," the lady said softly, opening the fridge and pulling out two chilled cans of pop from the previous box. "Leave the groceries. I think we should go into the living room for this talk."

Kerry did as she was asked, following the woman through the dining room and into the sitting room she had spent so many hours sitting in absolute boredom eight years before, stealing glances at the mysterious and dangerous vampire who caused her heart to race in a way which worried her. She was vaguely surprised to see the bookcases had relatively the same set up now as they had then. She could see the Bach bust used to hold up a leather bound set of Dickens and Austen books and the bottom shelf of new mystery paperbacks still had unbroken spines, though the titles of the books themselves had been updated.

"I was wondering if this was going to happen," the woman said, sitting in Michel's favourite seat. Kerry awkwardly perched herself on the settee, feeling as though one wrong move would cause the whole thing to collapse. "Ever since the time they found that poor boy's body, I was wondering if someone would show up here. Are you a reporter?"

Kerry nodded. "I'm Kerry Nowicki."

"I'm Lucy, and yes, the house still belongs to Ethan's uncle. My husband and I rent it." She popped the tab on her Pepsi, becoming more comfortable with just the fizzing sound. "I'm a caffeine junkie," she said by way of explanation. "What sort of questions do you have? I'll do my best to answer, but I never met a young man named Ethan Bryne."

There was something in the way she said the words that gave Kerry a pause, as if Lucy knew that Ethan was not the real name of the person they were talking about. "I don't really have any questions," Kerry said honestly. "I'm not really sure why I'm here. I just wanted to..." Kerry broke off, finally deciding on an impulse instead of careful lies. "That's not true. I know exactly why I'm here." She leaned forward earnestly. "I'm also a friend of Michael's."

"I know," Lusy said with a secretive smile. "He mentioned I should expect you, though I thought it would take another day or so before you showed up."

"He mentioned me?" Kerry echoed in shock.

"Yes. When he asked Dave's – my husband's – help with situation he thought we should be appraised of. He said he'd give you a day to show up on your own before calling you in to help."

"Help? I don't know how much help I can be," Kerry hedged modestly. "I mean, I know about the "situation" and there isn't much that I can do."

"My husband needs someone to take care of investigating during the day," Lucy said frankly. "We have a child, so he doesn't want to risk my life."

Kerry felt as though Lucy were looking for a reaction to the fact that "Michael" was willing to put her life on the line, but Kerry didn't feel anything besides knowledge that it made sense. She was already aware of the danger, and when Michel hadn't called her back the night before, she had resigned herself to the idea that she would have to deal with it herself. She didn't have the resources or the contacts to know who else in Brockport could help her, and without Michel the only option she had been left with was hoping he hadn't sold the house. As far as Michel assuming she had the proper faculties to actually help the vampires was both an honour and nothing less than the truth.

It just amazed her a little that he saw it, especially since he hadn't seen her in four years.

"That's fine," Kerry finally responded with the realization that she had been focusing too intently on her own issues and that Lucy might be looking so expectantly for an answer not because of Michel but because she had just outted her husband as a vampire. God, Kerry thought, for someone who prided herself on being intelligent, she was slow sometimes. "Michael is probably right. I know this town pretty well, and as a reporter I have connections to both the police department and the morgue that can help." She didn't mention that her connection to the police was in the form of her boyfriend. It felt like two subjects which were almost sacrilege to link together: Michel never went well with cops.

As if reading her mind, Lucy continued, "Dave and I had a debate about who you are, especially after finding out that you're still alive and Ethan Bryne is not and Michael is willing to place some trust in you."

"About who I am?" Kerry wondered. "You mean who I am to him? I'm no one. It may seem like there should be something there when you look at the facts like that, but in truth I was sixteen at the time and Ethan doesn't – didn't – mess with children."

"It's more than that. Dave thinks that you're one of his playthings."

Kerry laughed, but it lacked true mirth. "Do you see Michael trusting one of his girlfriends? Calling her in to help with something that isn't alleviating his cock?" As soon as the words were out of her mouth, she wanted to take them back. It was far too vulgar of a thing to say to a woman she had just met and whose house she was currently visiting.

Lucy smiled. "So you do know him. That's why I think you're something more. You must be the love of his life."

Kerry could merely shake her head. "He doesn't feel emotions like love. He's incapable of it." Part of her, though, couldn't help but wonder. "I don't know if it's because he's a vampire or just who he is, but I don't think he's ever felt anything stronger than lust or admiration towards a woman before."

"Before," the woman said meaningfully, a secretive smile across her lips. "Vampires are very much capable of love. I don't know why you would think otherwise, though it probably has something to do with the fact Michael is the one you're getting your information from. Can you imagine what it must be like for them? They have these intense, heightened senses and when they feel emotions it's... well, obviously I don't know how it is, but it's probably passionate and powerful and eternal."

Kerry managed to hide her snort of mirth, realizing that Lucy was not talking about Michael anymore, but her husband Dave. Without seeing the two of them together, she couldn't judge whether this love was true or not, but she could tell by the animated shine to Lucy's face that she believed it was. Kerry didn't think emotions like that deserved to be mocked and ridiculed. She believed in true love once, after all, and Luke was starting to rekindle her hopes of finding it again. "I'm sure you and your husband have a wonderful relationship," Kerry answered diplomatically, "but you are right about the fact that the only basis I have is what Michael has told me, and if you know him at all, you know how he enjoys lying and toying with emotions."

"Ouch," Lucy said with a frown. "That's a harsh thing to say about him." She observed Kerry for a moment and then continued slowly. "But I guess that would be why he assured Dave you were good at seeing through things to the truth."

Kerry wasn't going to show surprise again, not knowing what to make of all this praise Michel was apparently giving her. She had a feeling he might not had said these things as positively as Lucy was making them sound. Certainly, when she and Michel had been 'together' her bullshit detector amused him just as much as it annoyed him, depending on the situation and whether he wanted her to believe him or not, and there had been instances where she thought he liked it a little too much, but he had never given any indication that he... Kerry wasn't sure how to finish that. That he what? He had told her that he enjoyed it when she crossed her arms over her chest and stubbornly accused him of lying to her, and sometimes he did it on purpose to see the little line between her eyebrows. She had just never really believed him when he told her it was one of her best charms.

Ironic, really.

Kerry steadily observed Lucy through the thoughts firing in her brain, her face giving away nothing. "I am," she affirmed. "I really am a reporter, and I'm good at my job."

Lucy's expression cleared and she took on the look of someone who just realized something important. "I don't know how I didn't notice this before!" she exclaimed. "It's not that he loves you – well, he might love you – but it's that he respects you. You're –" she was cut off by the hallway clock chiming three, and she jumped, looking at her watch to validate. "Oh my goodness, I should have left to pick up Chad from school five minutes ago. I know it's rude, but I'm going to have to kick you out now."

Kerry smiled to show there were no hard feelings as she got up from the chair, but really the smile was genuine. She never thought that there was anything in this house scarier than a rogue vampire, but there was. She didn't want all the old feelings and issues with Michel to come back to the surface after she had spent so much time anchoring them down with cement blocks. Pulling Ethan Bryne's car out of the river had dredged up far more than rusting metal, silt and bones.

Kerry emerged from the bathroom with her wet hair trailing down the back of her soft, pink terry robe, the cotton absorbing the excess water and enveloping her in the warmth left from her steamy shower. She felt relaxed, the thoughts in her brain no longer firing at a frenzy she couldn't keep up with. The scent of her body wash clung to her rosy skin, and she thought that if all showers could be as rejuvenating as this one had been, no one would need to spend money on skin tucks or massages.

Candles? Kerry wondered, considering the idea of continuing her evening off with soft classical music, a glass of wine, and maybe a bar of the secret Swiss chocolate horde she kept taped to the back of a dresser drawer. She shook her wet hair out with her fingers, giving it lift and waves that couldn't be replicated by a quick brush and product routine in the morning, as she rummaged through the fridge for the leftover wine from her birthday the month before. The only bit of alcohol to be found in the fridge was a small sample sized bottle of vodka like the ones served on planes or understocked and overpriced in hotel bedrooms.

With a mental shrug, she dumped the contents into a glass and poured orange juice on top, the smell bringing her back to her college years. With a smile, she took a sip and realized that she hadn't gotten the juice to alcohol ration just right, it being more juice than vodka.

"Darn," she muttered, grabbing the glass and pattering out of the kitchen barefoot. The lights were off in the apartment and the only illumination came from the streetlights outside and the occasional shadow-casting movement of a car head beams. No books. No movie. No music. She decided, feeling the tingle of relaxation and exhaustion swell in her breast. She wanted to just sit and stare into space for a while. She deserved an hour to waste on staring at nothing.

But apparently life had other plans.

Kerry inhaled deeply, hand reflexively tightening around the glass in her hand. Her eyes had adapted to the dark, but he was sitting in the shadows and the darkness of the leather recliner further hid him from view. She was used to seeing his form in the dark, a silhouette of shadow in the inky blackness of night, and her eyes easily recognised who he was. Kerry took a drink from her weak screwdriver, feeling her shoulders tense at the idea of company. Especially from Michel.

"Relaxing shower?" he asked, disarming her by reaching over and turning on a lamp. Kerry blinked against the soft light, turning her gaze away as she sat on the couch and put her feet up on the table.

"It had been," she responded, taking another fortifying sip of her drink before finally looking over at him. He was smirking at her, his hair falling into his eyes. He was wearing a light blue polo shirt and jeans, and was lounging in insolent comfort on her chair, ankle braced on the opposite knee.

God, he looked young.

Her heart rate smoothed out as she regarded him, realizing that though he was still attractive, her hands didn't itch to touch him and her breath wasn't shortened by perceived sexual tension in the room. Give it time, the cynical side of her whispered, but most importantly she was relieved, as though she had passed a test of some kind. It had been so long since she had seen him, and she was in love with someone else now. She had half expected to feel an overwhelming urge to shove him against a wall and fuck him. She didn't. Kerry smiled. "You didn't need to come here and deal with it yourself."

As she had been observing him, he had been watching her, and the look of amusement slipped from his face. His expression was the blankness he allowed through the cracks when false emotions failed and he didn't want the world to see him. Sometimes, Kerry used to think that the blankness was what he really felt, making him a vampire sociopath but other times she wondered if it was a show of vulnerability in a mask he thought was hiding all signs of weakness. "I know the area," he said with a shrug.

"It's dangerous for you here, especially now."

"Why Kerry," he mocked, the smirk back, "I didn't know you cared."

"I care enough," she snapped. "If the Ethan Bryne story is questioned, the Kerry Nowicki version will questioned too, and we both know that the case can't stand up to modern scrutiny. It wasn't even sound enough back then, but the fact that I was an innocent young girl, good grades, well-known in the community, and obviously the victim all backed up my story and the police and medical examiner both interpreted the evidence on my side."

"Ah," he said. "And murder doesn't have a statute of limitations. I bet you wish they had arrested you and allowed you to be tried in court instead of protecting you, because you still would have been found innocent, but they can't legally try you for the same crime again."

"And I bet you wish you had never offered me a drive home from the grocery store that night." She hated it, but the side of her that had loved him watched carefully for his response.

"And miss out on those nights of your pleasant company, being betrayed and shot in the knees, and having to skip town three years before I planned to? Of course I wouldn't give that up." His stare was even and as she looked at him, she couldn't help but wonder what he was really thinking.

There was a body in the car masquerading as Ethan Bryne, Kerry reminded herself. That was on him. He wasn't the innocent he wanted the world to see when they looked at his clean cut appearance. But she already knew that, and knew it well. "Have you located the vampire killing all those people?"

"It isn't always quite the same as locating a rabid dog. Sometimes the vampire can blend in and live as we all do until it comes to feeding, and then he loses control. Sometimes, he never loses control and the reasons behind the body count are more complicated."

Kerry was silent, still watching him as he leaned forward with his elbows braced on his knees, hands dangling towards the floor as he explained it to her. "You mean like deliberately leaving a trail," she said. It wasn't a question.

"Yes."

Kerry frowned. "Well," she said with a sigh. "That makes it way more complicated."

Michel agreed with her. They fell into a casual silence that was both uncomfortable and familiar. She was used to not having anything to say to him, though for years she had wished that she had been friendlier to him when given the chance. "So you decided on becoming a reporter?"

"Yes," she responded, though he knew about that. "I'm working for the Tribune now, but I'm hoping to become consultant for the Rockport Democrat and Chronicle."

"It's good to have dreams."

"You're just lucky one of them isn't a Pulitzer, because breaking this story might just make me big."

Michel snorted. "Or put you in the running for the staff of the National Enquirer." He reached across the table to grab her drink, casually taking a sip and grimacing. "Weak," he told her. Sitting back into the well-padded seat and surveying her. "I'm sure I don't have to warn you of the consequences if you decide to come up against us."

"I'm not stupid," Kerry said sharply. "And I wouldn't betray..." trailing off as she realized she had no way to finish the sentence.

"Who wouldn't you betray?" Michel asked, hiding a smile behind the glass.

"You," she finally answered, realizing she was corner. "Or at least the memory of you."

"Well, if it's good enough to keep you up at night..." he trailed off with a leer and a rise of his eyebrows.

Kerry smirked. "I have a boyfriend now. I no longer stay up for hours thinking about you."

Both of them ignored the fact she admitted that it had happened.

"I figured you were living with someone," he told her, placing the screwdriver back on the table and getting to his feet. He stretched slightly, like a cat loosening its muscles, and grinned down at her. "Either that or you suddenly gained a penchant for size eleven hiking boots, a porn stash, and mammoth sized hockey jerseys."

"I knew about the porn," she answered defensively.

"But Kerry," his voice continued, the tone deliberately low and sexy. "If you want to continue being faithful to him, you should think about tightening your robe and sitting with your legs on the floor the next time we speak."

Kerry inhaled sharply through her nose, defensively looking down at her position and realized he had made it sound far more indecent than it actually was. Still, she tightened the collar of her robe, but when she looked back into her living room, he was gone. She hadn't even heard him use the door.

Chapter Text

Kerry sat in front of her computer, jotting off a quick note to Michel. She guiltily looked over her shoulder, feeling as though eyes were on her. She met the eyes of one of her fellow grunts, and she frowned as she stared him down, wondering if she had any reasons to be paranoid. She didn't have that much to report to Michel, but she thought the best way to make sure they didn't start duplicating each other's work was to keep in contact. She didn't think the constant emails and phone calls she exchanged with Dave and Lucy counted. For one, it seemed Michel preferred getting his information straight from her instead of second hand from Dave, if the email she had received from him that morning was any indication.

Dave was easy to hold conversations with: their awkwardness and long soundless pauses had less to do with remembering one another naked than they did having absolutely nothing to talk about because they were complete strangers.

"Hello?" she said distractedly into her phone as she angrily erased the "Love Kerry," from the end of the email, disgusted with herself for being so thoughtless.

"Hey babe." Luke's voice was distinct over the line. Unlike some people, he always sounded like himself over the phone. Kerry jumped, feeling even more guilty for the email she was writing, especially her gaff of an ending. She then frowned and held her back straight and head high, realizing she had no reason to be ashamed. The email was only a few terse lines, and none of it mattered more than the feelings behind it, and she certainly was not in love with Ethan Bryne or Michel. Luke was the one who held her heart.

"Hi," she said, pressing the send button on the email and grabbing a pen from her desk, tapping it against the keyboard. "Did you just wake up?"

"Where's the toaster?" he asked, sounding befuddled even across the distance between the two of them.

"It broke last week, remember?" Kerry reminded him, her eyes wandering around the pen. Nelle was glaring at her computer, jiggling the mouse across the mousepad as though that would solve all her problems. 'Frozen?' Kerry mouthed to her, grinning as Nelle gave her the finger and pressed the reboot button on the tower.

"No," Luke responded mournfully. "But how do I make toast?"

"You could bake it in the oven." Kerry pursed her lips to keep from laughing outright at her boyfriend. "Or you could have one of the croissants I left in the fridge. They're fresh."

"They're fattening." He was coming perilously close to whining now.

"We all have our crosses to bear," Kerry informed him with an outright smile. "Look, hun, I have about an hour's worth more work to do here. Do you want me to pick you up something on my way home?"

"A toaster?"

"I was thinking more along the lines of a burger and fries, or maybe a fruit cup if you're so concerned with your figure these days."

"The croissant will be fine. Later babe." He pronounced croissant "crescent" and Kerry had to grit her teeth to stop herself from correcting him as she said her goodbyes.

x.x.x

I was si tting on the worn-down futon in my apartment, my European Medieval history book open in front of me. My midterm was in two days, but I anticipated a visit from him the night before and knew that no studying would get done then. He thought he was so unpredictable, but like clockwork he showed up every three months or so and I had noticed a pattern in the dates. I couldn't say what it was, but I somehow knew when he was thinking of dropping by. He'd hate that, if he knew.

I looked up from my book as a shadow fell between the lamp and the book I was trying to read. "Hey, studying here," I muttered, gesturing for the person to move. Despite my surety that he would be around soon, my heart beat still skipped when I looked up and saw him smirking down at me.

"Not anymore," he told me, taking the book off my lap and placing it beside me on the couch. He leaned over, both hands braced on the back of the couch on either side of my head. I could see the unending patterns of eternal blue in his eyes as he blinked, lowering his face towards mine for a kiss. I was already breathing heavily in anticipation and he hadn't even touched me yet. His demanding lips shot electric currents through my body, and I cursed him for a moment, wishing he had come a day later than I had predicted instead of a day before.

It was difficult to study when basking in the afterglow of Michel.

x.x.x

Kerry awoke to her cell phone ringing in the charger. She blinked at the time, seeing the display read 10 pm. She had only been asleep for an hour, and she felt like she was waking up with an insanely bad hangover. She listened to the phone for a second, hoping whoever was on the other end would just give up and hang up. Whoever thought that dreams really do come true must have been on crack. She crawled out of bed, hearing ShakeTramp play out for a second time from the living room.

"What?" she barked, opening the phone if only to get rid of the infernal song.

"Oh?" Michel's voice asked on the other end with obvious amusement. "Were you sleeping? I thought you might just be taking another shower."

"Eugh," Kerry responded wittily.

"Wakey wakey. We have work to do."

"I'm going back to bed," she grunted. "I spent the day doing footwork for you. I forwarded it all in an email."

"I got it," he informed her. "It was lovely. So personal. Are you going to leave me out here all night, staring at your living room window? Nice nightie by the way."

Kerry gasped, pulling down the short t-shirt she was wearing. When she had first moved in she had checked from all angles of the street and had never found a position where she could see in the windows. He had to be lying. Just in case, she gave the window her middle finger.

"Very hostile, Kerry. You need to work out your anger management problems."

"You can't see me," she yelled into the phone. "I checked myself. There is no possible way someone can see into my apartment from the street." The moments the words were out of her mouth she wanted to crack herself over the head with the cell. Way to not only prove him right about the anger management thing, she chided herself, but also show glaring stupidity. Of course he could see her. He was a vampire. He probably had better vision than infrared binoculars. Kerry could practically hear his smile over the phone.

"Well," he told her, "either I can see you, or I know you so well I can predict everything down to what you're wearing. I guess it depends on which scenario you prefer. I like Hello Kitty by the way. It makes you seem younger."

Kerry gritted her teeth. "What do you want?" she asked.

"Why don't you come down and see?"

"Why don't you tell me," Kerry retorted. "Then I'll see if I want to come down." She was steadily making her way towards the window, peeking out through the sheer curtains. There was definitely someone down there leaning against the driver's side of a dark coloured car. The figure gave her a mock salute.

"Well Kerry, if I can't drag you away from bed, I'll just join you."

Kerry glared at him, letting her curtains fall back to cover the windows. She stayed standing for a moment, bathed in the soft glow of the street light, and wondering if he was watching. She sighed through her nose, recognising that he had her in check and likely soon checkmate. Kerry turned her body away from the window, pausing with her back against the wall next to it. She considered his ultimatum for a moment, wondering if she wanted to antagonize him into coming up or if she should give into his demands.

"I'm tired, Michel," Kerry explained with another sigh. "Luke will be coming home at six, and he's woke me up every day this week." It seemed so strange to be explaining this to him, as though those four years had never happened and she still dropped everything – school, friends, family – for an hour of his time. He had pushed his limits then, and she had always caved to his demands, so it seemed almost wrong for her now to be explaining why she couldn't leave the apartment.

"So? Just rearrange your schedule so he doesn't disrupt your sleep." As always, Michel was sympathetic in the way that he was not. Every time, he would be the voice of unreason like the little devil on her shoulder, influencing her decisions in the polar opposite direction of what she should be doing. Well, he wasn't getting away with it this time.

"I'm trying to!" Kerry exclaimed with aggravation, gritting her teeth. "Why do you think I was in bed by nine?"

"What I meant," Michel explained, "is that you start sleeping when he sleeps."

"I have a job. I can't just start going to sleep at six when I'm usually in the office by ten." She was about to tell him that she wasn't a vampire and couldn't just stay up all night like he did, but she bit her tongue. He didn't exactly need to be told that. It was his fault she wasn't, after all, and she was kind of grateful for it now.

"That is an excellent point," he told her, but the sound of his voice wasn't carried over the phone line. He was standing before her, inside the living room. Again, she hadn't heard the door open or close. Kerry didn't jump, or eep, or give any outward signs of shock, but it was close. She was glad she hadn't responded with anything other than a kick of her heart rate. Her pride was at risk almost always when it came to Michel and she had already made a fool of herself tonight.

"No point for this, then," she said with a humorous smile as she closed her phone. She moved closer to him, sitting on the chair he had sat in when she saw him last. This time his hair was in a shorter style, spiked preppy-chic instead of the usual straight look he went for. It matched the rectangular black framed glasses he had covering his startling eyes, and the clean-cut collared shirt to create an older image than what she was used to.

Even behind the glasses, she could tell his eyes were still laughing at her.

"I'm tired and I want to go back to bed." Kerry said bluntly, hoping he didn't invite himself along this time.

"I know," he said, still smirking at her. She so desperately wanted to wipe that smirk right off his face. He sat on the couch, deliberately mimicking the position she had been sitting in during his last visit. Kerry narrowed her eyes as he widened his leg span in a way which would have been highly indecent if she had done it in a robe. She wanted to indignantly protest, but she thought she might be reading too much into it. There was many a-time that she had done that in his presence.

"So," Kerry said, pointing to her open bedroom door to imply where she was heading. "I'll talk to you later? At least send me a quick email if you find anything out tonight so I won't waste time retracing your steps."

"I'm breaking into the city morgue." Michel said casually.

Kerry stopped dead on her way to the bedroom, pausing with practically one foot still in the air. She wavered for a moment and then regained her balance, turning towards him. "I'll get a pair of pants."

It was for the best that she missed the smug smile on his face.

x.x.x

"Most places have their morgue in the basement of the hospital," Michel griped, one knee braced against the frosted grass as he leaned over and glared at the small bicycle lock chaining the basement window closed. "Not on Main Street where everyone can see the front door. Most also don't have those back doors that can only be open from the inside."

Kerry grinned at his discomfort, knowing that he was mostly worried about getting caught. He'd have no trouble picking the small lock, though she could barely see the keyhole on the back of the padlock herself, and he was impervious to the cold. She was leaning over his shoulder, watching intently as he took the lock pick set out of his back pocket. She was very much in his personal space, and she was just waiting for him to get impatient and ask her to back up. "You lived here 'all your life,'" she said with finger quotes. "Surely you've had to break in to the morgue before."

"Of course. Why do you think this window is locked?" Michel asked, shooting her a quick grin as the chain fell away. He pulled the window back and peeked in, only to find a large cabinet barring his way. "Shit," he swore under his breath.

Kerry kept grinning.

"You knew this was here," he accused with narrowed eyes.

"Maybe," Kerry agreed, "but mostly I just enjoyed watching you go through hoops unnecessarily."

"What do you suggest I do?" he asked scathingly. "Go through the front door?"

"I'll get the key," she responded, still grinning as she stood on tiptoe in order to reach a windowsill just beyond her reach. Michel shook his head ruefully as she hopped up, but still could not grasp the hidden key.

"Here," he offered finally, stepping behind her. She turned her head to watch as his hands slid around her waist and he easily lifted her into the air. The key was where she expected it to be, the sill around it covered in scratches from years of people removing it and placing it back. His grasp held her incredibly steady and he kept her in place as though she weighed nothing. Part of her wanted to kick him for it. As she grabbed the key, Michel finally put her down and stepped away. Kerry wasn't completely convinced he couldn't have reached the key himself, but she knew that Luke would have had no problem.

"Do you think the M.E. wakes up in the middle of the night if old Mrs. Whoever kicked it during Letterman?" Kerry asked rhetorically, brushing down her jacket and quickly moving away from him and towards the front door. "No. He lets the paramedics and attendants and other menial staff take care of it."

Michel shook his head. "I've been away from small-town life for too long. It's a wonder you don't have bodies going missing all the time."

"Who would take them?" She asked. "Besides freshmen involved in hazing rituals and the like? I only knew the key was there because the medical examiner and I are like this." Kerry crossed her fingers.

"Like this like how you and I are like this?" Michel asked, taking the key from her and opening the front door like he belonged there, and wasn't in the process of breaking and entering. Kerry had to resist the urge to look guiltily over her shoulder.

"You and I are not like that," she pointed out sternly.

"But you and Dr." Michel broke off as he read the name on the door plate. "Roberts are?"

"He and I are just friends," she said coldly, moving past him to open the door into the examination area.

"We're not friends?" Michel asked in a wounded voice, trailing behind her. "Or do you mean that we're more than friends?"

Kerry turned around, frostily facing him. "It has been a long time since we've been anything more than friends." She glared at him, her own anger chilling herself to the core.

Michel looked her straight in the eye and said, "not to me, it hasn't. Four years isn't that long to a vampire."

Kerry left that statement alone. She wanted to tell him that four years was plenty of time for a human to recover from the devastation of losing him, enough time to find love again and to allow her overwhelming hate to die down into ambivalence. She thought he might know all that, but if she said it he would accuse her of still being bitter, or of protesting too much. "What is it you're looking for," she asked, finally dragging her eyes away from his.

"Coward," she thought she heard him mutter beneath his breath. "I need to see the bite radius, and see how much blood your good friend Dr. Roberts thinks is missing."

"About six pints," she answered smoothly, following him as he opened one of the refrigerated body storage units. In the dark, the light-coloured bones gleamed up from the dark metal of the tray and they both stared down at the remains in silence. "Meet Ethan Bryne," she told him finally. "It's no mystery who killed this guy."

"Marsala did," Michel said easily. "That man was crazy." He closed the unit, moving forward to the next in the row of five. He pulled this one opened to find it empty. "Doesn't good friend Roberts label these things?"

"To what end?" Kerry asked. "So he doesn't mix up the two bodies that always seem to rotate through here? And we both know Marsala was far less crazy than people remember him."

"He was a quack," Michel responded, pulling open the third unit and finding the body of an old woman. "Even before we framed him for Ethan's death, he was bonkers. He locked your baby brother in the trunk of your car. Who knows when he would have been found if your dad wasn't there with him."

"And whose fault was all that?"

Michel looked up at her just before opening the forth unit, one eyebrow raised. "Are you insinuating that the entire thing was my fault? Because, technically, it was Ian's for leaving his stuffed koala in a laundry mart."

Kerry was slightly impressed he had remembered Footy. However, she was less than impressed he was blaming Ian. "If you want to get technical, it was mom's fault for running off with Scotty and the family laundry machines."

"Scotty? You're calling him by name now? It used to be 'the homewrecker' and 'mom's manwhore'. What happened to those, they were amusing?" Michel finally opened the drawer, finding the corpse he was looking for. He immediately bent closer to the neck wound, staring at it intensely. Kerry almost offered him a light, but then she remembered that he didn't need it. He could actually see better without one on.

"I keep getting those two songs mixed up. You know 'Scotty Doesn't Know' and 'Stacy's Mom.'"

"I try not to." Michel straightened, casting his eye critically over the rest of the body. "There's nothing here," he said, as though he expected the entire thing to be solved with a single clue like on Murder She Wrote.

"The doctor keeps his medical charts on his desk. Maybe there's something in there."

Michel moved towards the office, dodging around the scalpel tray Kerry always seemed to knock into, even in the daylight, and began sorting through the papers on the heavy wooden desk. "Why did you come back here?" he asked, flipping through the notes at a speed that appeared as though he didn't have time to actually read the first sentence, but she knew he was skimming through the entire page at an alarmingly quick pace.

"Because you practically dragged me out of my warm bed," Kerry answered with a frown, sitting in the old, wool covered seat in front of the desk. The doctor obviously didn't have company very often, and if he did he didn't waste any of his limited funding on making people comfortable. It reminded her a lot of the furniture in some of the less common areas of her dorm. Great to study on, but rather uncomfortable. The night she lost her virginity, the padding gave her a bad case of rug-burn on her knees.

"First," Michel said, not even looking up from his reading, "I did not drag you. It took very little to convince you once you found out breaking and entering was involved. You need more excitement in your life," he told her, raising his eyes over his glasses frames for a moment to shoot her a quick grin. "Second, you know that wasn't what I meant. Why come back to Brockport?"

"There are far less options opened to college graduates than they lead you to believe. Where else was I supposed to go? I had practically no experience and—"

"Bull. Shit." Michel cut her off sharply. "You were the one with the byline outing one of the tenured profs for sexual harassment."

"He grabbed my ass."

"And the article on where the conservation society obtained its grant."

"It was ironic that they were so concerned with the environment and yet took money from a company commonly known to dump waste."

"You were practically the paper's star reporter. Don't even try to tell me that newspaper scouts weren't hounding you to work for them when you graduated."

Kerry went silent, crossing her arms over her chest and looking at the floor. "Dad asked me to come home for a while. Ian was getting in trouble at school and he told me how the newspaper here was practically begging for reporters who could write a sentence."

"And you came," he said simply, now looking at her with an odd expression on his face. "You had the chance to take the world by the balls, to achieve all those dreams you had of being an international correspondent, to win a Pulitzer – and don't tell me you don't want that, I know you – and you just threw it all away because your father couldn't get his own life together?"

"I'm happy," she told him, though the quaver in her voice belied her statement. "I have a good job. A good life."

"Are you?" he asked critically. "I don't think you are."

How can I be happy? She wanted to scream at him. You did this! This is your fault, Michel. Instead, she smiled at him, that fake smile she had practiced in the mirror so that it looked better than her genuine one. "Of course I am. I have Luke."

Chapter Text

Kerry awoke to Luke climbing into bed with her, sharing his warm body heat by curling his arm possessively around her waist and falling asleep within moments, his breath soft against her neck. She had been asleep for a total of three hours, she realized as she glanced at the clock, and she had a chance for one or two more before she had to be at work. I hate you, Michel, she thought, turning over and snuggling against the warm form of her sleeping boyfriend. She felt protected and safe in his embrace, and as she curled in his arms, she could feel the heat radiating off his body instead of the cool sheets she had fallen asleep to. Her stomach felt vaguely sick, a reminder that she had dreamed about him again, probably due to their close proximity the night before. She was almost used to it these days, even as far as having good days, sometimes even weeks, where she didn't even see him as she slept.

But that memory, that dream, had been particularly brutal, especially after their serious conversation the night before. She had wanted to shove his face in the fact that if she was unhappy, if he thought she should be doing bigger and better things with her life, it was his fault that she wasn't. He had been the one to marginalize her and strip her of her dreams. He had killed something inside her and it had taken her years to get it back.

There was no way Kerry was about to give him the satisfaction of knowing what effect his actions had had on her. There was no way she was going to show him how weak she had been four years ago, or how important he was to her despite all his warnings for her not to love him.

Finally realizing she would be unable to go back to sleep, Kerry crawled out of bed. She felt exhausted and overheated as though she had a fever, and she stumbled into the bathroom for a drink of water. Today, she would have to finish her article on the annual apple pie festival, carefully finding a way to praise each contestant – even Mrs. Evans, who had made crust with baking soda instead of powder and had topped it off with cheese. She would also have to do some leg-work for Michel during the day, but she didn't think she'd find anything as they had been coordinating their efforts at finding the vampire leaving a trail of dead bodies in its wake for days, with barely any result.

Kerry wasn't sure what more she could do. There wasn't much left besides standing on a street corner for hours in the middle of the night as bait with Michel hiding under a bush to apprehend whoever attacked her as easy prey. It didn't actually sound like that bad of an idea, she mused, staring at her red eyes in the mirror. Maybe she'd suggest it to him if she didn't find any new information out today.

And then Luke could come along and arrest her for solicitation.

Kerry padded into her living room and sat on the couch, staring out at the street and reflecting on the pre-twilight calm. Michel was probably still awake, she reflected, she could run the bait idea by him. She put her head down on the side of the couch, finally feeling her body temperature start to cool down as she debated the merits of calling him. Instead, she awoke four hours later to the sun shining over her eyes and her cell phone ringing. "Hello?" she asked, voice husky from sleep.

"You're fifteen minutes late for work," Nelle hissed. "The gossip and horoscope columnist – whatshername – just came over and asked if you'd been in yet. I told her you planned to talk to one of the pie ladies this morning before finishing your article."

"I'll be there," Kerry croaked.

"Are you ok?" Nelle asked. "You sound sick. Are you coming down with something?"

"No. I just woke up. I couldn't get to sleep last night without Luke, and then when he came home he woke me up." Kerry rubbed her eyes, wondering why she was on the couch. She knew that her words to Nelle had been a lie, since she had not only been out with Michel until three in the morning, but she had also slept for about an hour before that, but she felt like they should be true. Was it odd that she had been unable to fall back to sleep with Luke next to her?

"That's so sweet," Nelle crowed. "I can't wait to be in love."

"I'll be in as soon as I can. Just keep covering for me." Kerry was already on her way into the bathroom. There was no way she was going anywhere without a shower, especially with the night she had. She probably still smelled like the morgue and possibly even sweat from the hot-flash she had taken.

"I will," Nelle promised. "I still owe you from the time you ran interference when I was hung-over."

"Yeah, you do. See you in a bit." Kerry closed her phone, feeling like an idiot for sleeping in. It took her twenty minutes, including driving time, to reach the newspaper office, and she managed to slip into her seat without anyone making any sleeping-in jokes. Nelle gave her a crazy wink as Kerry booted up her computer and set to work reorganizing her desk. She quickly pulled up her notes on the pie festival, and managed to finish the article within fifteen minutes.

"Here," Nelle said, placing a mug of coffee from the place next door by Kerry's elbow. "I figured you didn't have time to grab any on your mad dash out the door."

"Bless you," Kerry breathed. "You're the best friend a girl could ever have."

"I know," Nelle said smugly. "I forwarded the picture I selected for the pie article to your email. I thought you'd like to see it before submitting your final draft."

"Thanks," Kerry responded, pulling up her staff email account.

"If there's anything you want to talk about," Nelle offered, suggesting she thought there was something Kerry was keeping from her.

"Not right now," Kerry said, taking another sip of coffee. "But I'll tell you all about it when I can."

"Gotcha," Nelle said, moving away towards her own desk. Kerry didn't think she did. Nelle probably thought Kerry was working on a news story she didn't want to mention yet out of some superstitious belief that silence was golden until the big revealing, but instead the problem was far too personal. How did Kerry tell Nelle that Michel was back when Nelle hadn't really been around four years ago? How did she put it into words?

You know Ethan Bryne? The guy whose bones were just drudged out of the river? Well, he's not dead, or well he is dead but he's not really dead. You know what I mean? Anyway, he and I had a tumultuous affair four years ago when I was in college where we jumped each other's bones. A lot. He left. Now he's back. Are there any doughnuts?

Yeah, that wouldn't go over too well. Not that it mattered, because Nelle was already wandering back to her computer and Kerry would never even think to let her friend in on the secret. She had kept Ethan Bryne to herself for eight years. It wasn't even that difficult anymore because a part of her wanted him all to herself and telling would be sharing.

It wasn't Nelle's email which caught her eye but the one which had been sent just after six that morning. The name on the email address was unfamiliar, but she knew who it was from and without realizing it she smiled before opening it.

Kerry,

I've included a list of suspects in the immediate area. Don't get too excited over the secrets I'm sharing. These people have relatively no ties to me, so if you hound them be aware that they probably won't hesitate to off you in a painful and complicated manner. Have you been involved in any drug-related crimes recently? They probably also won't tell you my age, even if you ask nicely. You should probably wait for me before paying them any visits. They won't be awake until a time when I'm available anyway, so you won't miss anything waiting for me to wake up. See how easily this became a duel investigation?

M

PS: I've added pseudonyms and last known locations for your researching pleasure.

Kerry shook her head as she viewed the list of vampires in the north-west area of New York state, including those listed in Rochester. After the incident with Ethan Bryne eight years ago, she had been under the impression that the vampires were staying away from the area, but Michel's directory listed a good two dozen vampires as well as the other information he promised her. It boggled her mind to think what she could do with information like that. She could write one hell of an article, backed up by hard facts, that was sure to make headlines, be picked up by the New York Times and other forerunners of American journalism. He was right; she did want the recognition of being one of the top journalistic minds in the country.

It would be so easy to pretend she was doing the research to catch the rogue vampire in order to lend legitimacy to her actions. Instead, she' be writing an amazing article behind Michel's back. One that people would talk about for years to come – the article that outed vampires as walking among humans. She'd take everything Michel ever told her and turn it into a three part expose.

The level of trust he was putting in her amazed her a little bit. Did he not see what she could possibly do with it? She had assured him she wasn't after recognition, but what he had said the night before was also true. Kerry wasn't sure when she had forgotten about her dreams of receiving writing awards, having a busy news desk in the Times or Globe and Mail and competing for above the fold stories, and exchanged them all for getting full-time work at the Brockport Tribune and marrying her white-bread boyfriend. She wanted her life back, and oddly enough it would be Michel who gave it to her. It would be his downfall.

At the same time it was difficult to betray Michel like that. She might not love him anymore, but part of her was loyal to what had been between them.

He trusted her, and he very rarely trusted anyone.

She could never betray him. She couldn't even entertain the fantasy of doing so without feeling an extreme sense of guilt, as though she were betraying herself.

Kerry was in the process of immediately sending him a response, slightly teasing him about how drug related crimes were his modus operandi, when she realized that he wouldn't get it until after she had finished her research for the day. It would be far smarter of her to just reply with one update than several, far more utile, and he hardly needed hourly updates. She couldn't help but wonder whether he would enjoy reading little casual notes from her, even if he wasn't around to receive them right away. She did occasionally send emails like that to Luke, especially when he was working during the day, and –.

But Luke was her boyfriend, and she didn't care for Michel on the same level.

"Nowicki!"

Kerry jumped as her boss exclaimed her name from next to her elbow. Her first reaction told her to minimize the window with Michel's half written response, but logically she knew that Gallant had probably already read it over his shoulder while she was woolgathering. "Yes, sir?" she answered as respectfully as possible, swinging her chair to the side in order to meet his gaze.

"Writing personal letters on company time?" he wanted to know. "You know how I feel about that."

"Not a personal letter," she corrected him. "Just a note back to a friend who just hooked me up with some privileged, incredibly difficult to obtain info." As luck would have it, she had even started the thing off with 'thanks for the info' so it wasn't as though she was lying. "And then I came up with a fantastic approach to the article, and started to think that through instead." As far as explanations went, it was pretty decent, but Kerry wondered at the reason why she felt it was necessary to say all that. Obviously, she had a guilty conscious at being caught both writing a personal letter and thinking about boys.

"What article?" Gallant asked, hovering with renewed interest and not just to make her feel uncomfortable.

Great, Kerry reflected, he had latched on to the one thing she was lying about. She couldn't just say it was for the pie piece, as she had already sent it off to be edited. "Something new I'm working on in my spare time. I'm not sure it'll pan out."

"Don't give me that line. We both know its complete bullshit. That's what you say when you don't really have a story—"

"Or when you're in the process of breaking a few laws to get the proper information. If you must know," Kerry lowered her voice to a whisper. "I think that mysterious animal attack last week was really murder and that it'll happen again shortly."

Gallant's eyebrows winged up. "Murder," he mused. "Seems impossible in Brockport, but I admire your ambition."

Ambition. There was that word again. Kerry reasoned that now that she was thinking of her own ambitions, the topic just seemed to stick out whenever it was mentioned. She smiled vaguely at Gallant, despite the fact he was discouraging the idea that there was actually a story involved. He thought she was seeing things where there was nothing to be seen.

"Mrs. Morton on Pine street. Her cat got caught up in the tree again, and it took almost the entire fire department and a pair of scissors to get the thing down. Write something amusing, but that won't have the old broad and her eleven cats traipsing into my office to complain."

"Yessir," Kerry muttered.

"You can work on your other story once you're done," Gallant offered, walking away from her desk ruefully shaking his head and muttering 'murder' under his breath. Kerry knew that once a third body was found, she'd have to have a piece ready to be printed, outlining the case and why it was murder. She was sure it would be a balancing act, trying not to compromise the investigation by reporting information Dr. Roberts had told her in confidence and never even hinting at the idea of vampires. Without those two factors, she basically had nothing.

Kerry sighed, exiting the window of the unsent message to Michel. It seemed like her work was piling up to epic proportions. Before Ethan Bryne had been pulled out of the canal, she had gotten by with writing an article or two a day, doing minimum research, and playing a billion games of solitaire and freecell on her computer. She had been coasting through her career, intent on getting a comfortable full-time position at the Tribune, and content with being told what her next assignment was.

She had also been bored out of her mind.

x.x.x

Kerry was at the scene before most of the officials arrived, including the medical examiner. This time, the body wasn't in a secluded area of a jogging trail, but in the living room of the victim's own house. His neck had been brutally ripped open, sharp furrows from claws or nails marring the pale skin of his cheek. A few feet away from his oddly bent head rested the hunk of flesh torn from the front of the throat, a splatter a blood oozing from the jagged remains of the jugular. She avoided looking directly at the wound, knowing it would expose far more insides than she was comfortable seeing. Kerry could see the clouded brown eyes, widened in both pain and shock gaping at her, and she swallowed against the bile rising in her throat. It had been a while since she had seen a body still lying in the place where a living being had died, and as indifferent as she felt seeing someone set up in the morgue, this scene brought Marsala back to mind. At the same time, it was far, far worse. With Marsala there hadn't been nearly as much blood and the horror of the situation had been deeply negated by the fact that his death had been in self defence. This new victim of the vampire attacks was innocent. As far as she knew.

Kerry couldn't help but feel that his death was her fault too. She wasn't moving quickly enough to find this rogue vampire.

"Don't any of you people watch CSI?" Dr. Roberts bellowed upon reaching the scene and finding her standing within the perimeter. He was addressing the young officers who were with her, supposedly guarding the body. Both had been sick in the bushes since she arrived. "Do you think Gil Grissom would have been happy to find a reporter in his crime scene?"

One of the poor lackeys shook his head. The other looked like he was about to bolt back to the bushes.

"I watch TV, doctor." Kerry said. "I knew to stay back and not touch the body. I also know that one of the first things I would do is bag his hands. It looks like he might have put up a fight and have DNA under his fingernails."

Dr. Roberts gave her a stern look. "Don't you have any weddings to cover? Or maybe interview one of those mothers who are trying to ban the Harry Potter books from the school library."

Kerry snorted. "Murder sells."

The medical examiner looked sadly down at the body. "It doesn't look like this one can be mistaken for an animal attack, does it?"

"No," she said quietly. "I know you have to get to work. I'll stop by later for an official statement before the story goes to the printers tonight."

"I don't appreciate this, Kerry," he said coldly, crouching over the body and examining the hands. "I spoke to you in confidence, not so you could make headlines."

"If I was trying to make headlines I would have ran the story back when it was still news. In a town like Brockport, everybody and their dog will be gossiping about murder by suppertime, and by breakfast tomorrow it'll be old news." She turned to leave, acutely feeling the injustice of being mistrusted simply because of her profession, especially in a situation where she was putting her job second and her friends first.

"Let's hope so," Dr. Roberts murmured as she left.

Out in the light, Kerry shielded her eyes against the sun, rummaging through her large bag in order to locate her sunglasses. The weather seemed to be inexplicably sunny these past few days, or maybe she was only noticing the sun when her mind was on the blackness of night. She slipped the RayBans on her eyes, grabbing her phone and dialling the pianist.

Hi, Michel's voicemail said in a tinny sounding recording of his voice, I'm sorry I can't answer the phone right now. Leave a message and then wait by the phone until I call you back.

"There's been another one," Kerry said with no preamble. "On of those streets with the cutesy name. Hold on a sec." She glanced to the nearest street corner, squinting as she attempted to see what was on the far-off sign. "You'd probably be able to see this thing no problem," she muttered. "I think it's at 35 Lark's Song Avenue. It's a pretty gruesome scene. No one is going to take this as a random animal attack."

She hung up the phone and got in her car, heading back towards the newsroom. She had a half-written article to finish and forward to Gallant, and even more research to get through. Half way to the office, she remembered that she should also call Luke and let him know that she probably wouldn't be back before he left for work. As she reached for her phone, her head was finally cleared of the cloying, bitter feeling that had stayed with her all day from waking up with the remembrance of Michel and that night in her dream.

But, she never truly escaped, because it wasn't really a dream at all.

x.x.x

I sighed, turning to cuddle against his side with my head pillowed against his cool shoulder. We were both sticky with sweat, and I could audibly hear each intake of breath and each rhythmic beat of both our hearts. They would never beat in tandem, so long as I was still human and he was a vampire. Lately, I had been wanting to hear a sense of synchronization when I was with him like this. His fingers were pressed against the pulse in my neck, and I felt like kissing him but I didn't think I could move my head. "I want to come with you," I told him breathlessly.

"You've come with me a few times tonight already," he teased, caressing my shoulder.

"You know what I mean." I was not allowing him to deflect the conversation this time. My inner voice, the one which ensured my self-preservation, screamed at me to stop. "I've been offered jobs practically everywhere in the states. It would be so easy."

"You want to watch as I fool around with other women?" he asked sharply. "Because that's what will happen. I'll need to feed, and you'll get hurt."

I lifted my head to scrape my teeth along the pulse point on his neck, waiting for him to react. His hand clenched around my waist, and he exhaled sharply as I pressed my tongue against the pulsing flesh. "Change me," I offered, a tantalizing seduction.

He pushed me away from him so quickly my head snapped back, leaping out of bed and glaring down at me with his mouth gaping open and his eyes wild with speculation and distrust. I immediately knew it had been the wrong thing to say, wrong time, wrong everything. "Is that what you're after?"

"No," I denied. "You know me. I just want to be with you."

He shook his head, unwittingly copying my denial. He was the Greek god of fury in all his naked wrath. "No," he said, and then repeated it in a firmer voice. "I don't know where you got the idea that this was more than—"

"Michel," I appealed, trying to stop him from saying what surely came next. Noo, that inner voice was wailing. Look what you've done, look what you've done.

"Goodbye, Kerry."

And he just left. He didn't come back.

My heart was broken. My life was turned around. I could never be happy again.

Chapter Text

"Hey Dr. R." Kerry called out, walking into the front room of the morgue. She was relieved to see he wasn't in his office. She didn't think she could face the scruffy chair and battered wooden desk he called furniture so soon after her heart-to-heart with Michel. The vampire had brought up a lot of things she had been running from, and she didn't need another reminder now that she was thinking about it almost constantly – that is, in what time she had when she wasn't trying to solve a mystery that seemed to go beyond her powers of deduction.

That afternoon, while she had been busy researching the list of vampires Michel sent her, Lucy had called for a status update. Kerry told her she would stop by to exchange notes with Dave once she found out more details about the cause of death. That was what led her to the morgue in the hour before sundown, seeing if she could find any new information that could help her track down a killer. "Doctor? Where are you doctor?"

"Kerry? I'm glad you stopped by," Dr. Roberts called out to her from inside the morgue. Though Kerry couldn't see him yet, it always pleased her when people recognised her just by her voice. It made her feel a certain level of importance. She walked through the metal doors and into the interior of the morgue.

"I just need a quote to insert in my article," Kerry told him, placing her trench-style jacket and large purse on a bench next to the door. She pulled out her BlackBerry and opened up the paragraph of her article she needed a citation for. "I've written, 'Medical examiner Dr. Edward Roberts is quoted as saying – insert quote –. The doctor first noticed a distinct lack of blood in Peter Anderson, the first potential victim, but was unable to draw definite parallels between the two bodies.' Is that okay?"

"Sure," he answered, obviously distracted as he took off the protection goggles over his eyes. "Oh, you need me to say something fitting? How about: the investigation is ongoing, but it appears as though Doug Harrison and Lenny Manning were killed in the same manner."

"Say something about the blood," Kerry urged.

Roberts gave her a frustrated glare. "Why don't you just write what you want and say I said it? Fine: in both cases, approximately six pints of blood were unaccounted for."

"Oookay," Kerry said, finishing entering the quote into her phone. She quickly scanned it over and immediately emailed it to Gallant so he could update her article and edit where need be. "Great. Thanks."

"Can I ask you a question now," he asked. He was still standing next to the body, looking down at it uncertainly.

"Sure," Kerry said, taking a step closer to him. She didn't want to see this body again, unsure whether she'd be able to keep herself from being nauseated. It'll be fine, she reminded herself. It was just the fresh crime scene which had gotten to her. "What's up?"

"I've been trying to think of an animal which could do this type of damage to the human body, and I thought..." he trailed off.

"Yes?" Kerry asked with an eyebrow raised.

His kind eyes came up off the body and locked with hers. "Do you believe in vampires?" he asked suddenly.

"Vampires," Kerry echoed weakly.

"I know it's foolish, but I was watching that vampire movie with Tom Cruise in it last night with Alice. You know what one I mean?"

"Interview with a Vampire," Kerry said with a nod. "It's one of my favourites." She was enjoying Roberts's level of discomfort over the conversation, but she was pretty anxious herself. Soon he'd stop babbling about how he had come to the conclusion that vampires had killed the men and expect an answer from her. She didn't know whether to tell him the truth – that vampires certainly had done it – or lie to him. It all came down, she supposed, to which scenario would keep him safer.

But was that really up to her to decide?

"The blood loss, the human teeth marks, the superhuman strength all seems to make sense." The medical examiner looked at her again, his eyes pleading for her to tell him he was crazy. Kerry knew the look well; it was the look of someone who wanted to stay in denial that the monsters under the bed were real. He didn't want her to tell him he was right. He wanted her say he was wrong. As Kerry realized this, he kept talking. "So I thought I'd ask you, since that incident eight years ago had something to do with vampires. Do you think they're real?"

"No," Kerry told him, her mind telling her this was the wrong answer, even as the words emerged from her mouth. "Vampires aren't real." She began to back away from him. "I need to go," she said, picking up her belongings from the bench and fleeing from the room. As soon as she was out of earshot, she picked up her phone and called Michel. This would be the third message she left him today, she reflected. So much for trying to avoid giving him a step-by-step update of her day by the hour.

"Hello?" he answered on the first ring, causing her to almost drop her phone in surprise.

"I didn't realize the sun had set," she blurted out, just as she hit the heavy metal doors to outside. The sun had indeed set, giving front street a soft glow from the street lights. She shrugged into her jacket as she moved down the cement stairs.

"You can call back and leave a message," he said in a clearly amused tone. "I was just about to listen to the first two you left. It'll be a threefer one deal."

"Haha," Kerry said, clipping down the sidewalk at a rapid rate. She passed the old Laundromat, and couldn't help but glance in. Since Michel and Regina had taken care of the old owner, it had changed hands a few times and ultimately became a flower shop. She was suddenly struck by inspiration as she passed by on the opposite side of the street. "Don't bother. I'm about to grab some supper. I'll meet you at the pizza place."

x.x.x

Kerry swirled her fry through her ketchup, her heart rate elevated with excitement as she waited for Michel to show up. That afternoon had been success on multiple fronts, except for maybe the part where Lenny Manning died. She had found a few ways to connect the victims, now that she could see a trend. With three bodies, any similarities between all of them were less likely to be a coincidence than they were with two. Her research had also yielded a suspect, which was the reason for her second call to Michel.

As she waited for Michel, she reviewed this all in her head, so sure she was missing something but unable to put her finger on it. She knew that Lucy and Dave were currently waiting for her at Ethan Bryne's old house, but this conversation seemed more important to her than meeting with people she barely knew to share her hard-earned information with them.

She had faith that if there was something she missed, Michel was intelligent enough to find it. She didn't have any idea whether Lucy and Dave would, but she was inclined to believe people were, on the most part, unintelligent until they proved otherwise. Four years at college had taught her that their level of education did not mean squat, either.

So lost in thought, she didn't see him enter the restaurant, but it didn't bother her as much as it should have. In all the years she knew him, he had snuck up on her a time or two. Of course, there was also a time when she could just feel his eyes on the back of her neck if he entered a room and looked at her.

"For all the interviews you do," he griped, sliding into the booth across from her and causing her to jump, "you have absolutely no phone skills." Today, he was looking even more like a particularly well-off college student, wearing a very stylish military-esque wool jacket and leather gloves along with his glasses. She was used to his many looks, having seen him fit in with crowds which ranged from upper class yuppie to homeless juvenile delinquents. Kerry was always amused to detect slight differences in his persona when he dealt with other people depending on which look he was going for. This Michel verged on being arrogant. Ethan Bryne had been good-natured and slightly self-effacing. Whoever he was, he was always a charmer.

Kerry smiled sweetly. "Hello. Would you like some coffee?"

Michel gave her a mock look of annoyance. "Not right now," he said dismissively. "I listened to your messages. You sounded excited in the second one. What did you find out?"

Kerry grinned, slurping her cup of Pepsi just to prolong the explanation. She enjoyed the way his eyes narrowed in exasperation. "The third body allowed me to compare and contrast. Apparently all three men were in the same middle-age bracket, the oldest 65 and the youngest 50, and all three of them grew up in Brockport, moved away for a few years for college or a job, but ultimately came back to start a family."

"Interesting," he mused. "What else?"

"Well, the rest is probably just small-town things. They all belonged to the same gym, but there's only one in town and they didn't go at the same times. As far as I can tell, Peter barely exercised, but Doug was a fitness nut – he was out for a jog during the 'animal attack' – so it's unlikely to be a motivating factor. I checked to see if they banked at the same branch and they didn't, Lenny didn't have a mortgage, and though they all had nice houses, they weren't in the same area. Oh, and all three had library cards, but I figure that probably is a coincidence since almost everyone in town has a membership."

"Hmmm. Single? Married?"

"Married, single, married and girlfriend."

Michel smirked. "Men are pigs." He paused for a second. "How'd you find out about the girlfriend?"

Kerry smirked back at him. "Wife said he was working late last night. Work said he left early."

Michel nodded sagely. "Ah, girlfriend. Do you think we need to find her?"

"Probably not," Kerry said, taking another bite of her fries. "We can let the police do it. If she had seen anything, she'd probably be dead. He did make it home from the date."

"That's true. But what if the girlfriend's the one who offed him?"

"She won't be at the funeral?" Kerry asked, raising her eyebrows at the fact he had thought of something she hadn't. This was why she needed him – he was smart, and he understood the darker side of humanity more than she did. He challenged her.

Michel was now looking thoughtful, ignoring her question. "And why didn't the wife hear anything? He was found in his living room, right?"

Kerry put down her fry at the memory of the body, suddenly not hungry. "She's a nurse and only got home around noon."

"Maybe she knew about the affair and hired someone to kill her husband," he suggested, musing out loud. "It must be difficult being away all night, only to have your significant other dally with another woman – or man."

"Can we not talk about this now?" Kerry asked, feeling her stomach churn.

"Why? Because you undoubtedly told Luke you were working late and instead you're here eating supper when he's getting ready for work, and will likely spend the night with me? I can see the parallels, but then you and I aren't having mad, passionate sex in his bed, either."

"No," Kerry said sharply. Damn him. "Because while a conversation about blood probably whets your appetite, it's enough to turn me off food altogether and I'm trying to eat."

"That's strange," he said. "I seem to remember blood turning you on."

Kerry made a face of disgust and pushed her plate away from her. "You're right," she told him. "Men are pigs."

"Hey!" he protested with a laugh. "Hate the game, not the players. You're the one who ordered fries and then dumped an entire bottle of ketchup on them. If you don't want to think about blood, you should have gotten something else. What's up with ordering fries in a pizza place, anyway?"

"I had a piece while waiting for you to arrive."

"Well, it didn't take me that long."

"I skipped lunch," she mumbled. "And probably breakfast."

"Ok," he responded with an amenable smile. "So your first phone call is off limits because we can't talk body-talk, we've already dealt with your second call, why the third?"

"I just came from the morgue. Dr. Roberts asked me if I thought vampires existed."

The change in his posture was almost indistinguishable, but she had spent a lot of time studying his every move, and though it had been a few years since, she still noticed the way he stiffened at the word. "And?"

"I told him they didn't, but I thought you might like to know."

Michel narrowed his eyes in thought. "Your good friend Dr. Roberts might be a good person to have on our side."

Despite the fact Michel was referring to the investigation, she knew he meant the 'our' to be more general than just the two of them. He was considering whether a medical examiner would be a good person to let in on the secret about vampires, especially if finding out was inevitable for the doctor in question. "Do you usually have contacts on the inside? Like government or customs officials, or police officers?"

Michel shot her a quelling look.

"I'm just curious," Kerry defended. "I think it would be cool, that's all."

He sighed. "Some of us do, but they're difficult relationships to cultivate since we're not the most law abiding, politics supporting people. A lot of times they enjoy the sensationalism when they're young, but once they mature they realize that aiding and abetting one of us is pretty much career suicide and they turn against us."

Michel was staring intently at her, as though there was something he was daring her to comment on. She took the bait. "So you end up killing them?"

He gave her a feral smile.

"Nicely illustrated," she told him. "I'm really getting your point, now."

"Good," he responded, toning down his cold grin. "I would rather not have to kill your good friend Dr. Roberts."

Kerry grunted. "I did some research on those names you sent me," she said, clearly changing the subject. "Tammy Fitzpatrick, formally Crissy Morgan from Philadelphia lived in the same neighbourhood as a rash of murders. The police had no leads, but the deaths stopped practically the same day as she moved here."

"Oh?" Michel asked with his eyebrows raised.

"But I figured if it was that easy, you would have already taken care of her, so I dug a little more and found she had been living with someone in Philly, someone who didn't make the move with her. Did they separate or did she have to kill her lover?"

"You are good, I'll give you that." Michel said ruefully. "We'll leave Tammy alone for now. When news of what's going on here reaches her, she'll probably end up running again."

Kerry ignored his compliment. "I'll try to dig deeper tomorrow if I can. Sorry I didn't get too far. Things turned slightly hectic today."

Michel was reaching to cover her hand with his just as Kerry's phone rang. He pulled away as she reached for her purse, looking at the caller ID just as Shake Tramp got to the second stanza. Michel had his lips pursed, trying not to show amusement at her song of choice. "It's Dr. Roberts," she told him in a hushed whisper, as though the caller could hear her through the unanswered phone. "Calling from the office."

Michel gave her a small wave, telling her to take it.

"Hi Dr. R." She said. "Is something wrong?"

"No, no, not at all. I think I just cracked the case and I thought you'd like to hear about it. I've been doing research since you left here—"

"Tell him you'll come see him." Michel told her, interrupting the conversation. Sometimes, Kerry forgot how well he could hear.

"Hold on a second, Doctor," Kerry said. "My battery is running low. I'm going to come to you." She hung up the phone and looked at Michel as she stood, shoving the BlackBerry back in her purse. "Why am I going to him? He could have told me just as easily over the phone."

"You are not going in," Michel corrected her. "We're going in. If your good friend, the doctor, is about to tell you that vampires are real, I think I should be there for damage control. It's situations like this where humans get the wrong idea. They think all of us are savage killers that need to be put down for the betterment of the human race."

Aren't you? She thought about asking. Kerry stood from the table, grabbing her half-eaten fries to toss in the trash. Michel stood with her, opening the front door of the restaurant for her to walk out in front of him. In that moment he was the exact opposite of the image of a blood thirsty killer, with his disarmingly good, youthful looks and the charm he seemed to portray in the simplest conversation. She knew that in ways he was far more dangerous because of his looks, because no one looked at him and saw what he was capable of. She hadn't at first. In that situation in the Laundromat, she had believed every lie he had thrown at her, seen the fear on the surface because it was what she had expected, when in reality he had killed one of their friends.

"You've gone quiet," he comments, hands in his pocket despite the fact he had a fancy pair of leather gloves. She knew he was going for the disarmingly guiltless look to negate the bitterness in his voice from the last thing he had said.

"I was thinking of the night we met," Kerry said softly, not pointing out the flower shop as they walked past it. Either he remembered it used to be a Laundromat, or he didn't, but she wasn't going to bring notice to the fact.

Michel snorted softly. "It's a wonder you didn't jump right on the hunter bandwagon after that stellar show of humanity. Honestly, you saw some of the worst of it."

"Don't." She stopped him, not wanting to hear lies and justifications. "I've known who you are for a long time."

"Have you?" he asked cryptically, opening the heavy outer door to the morgue. She walked back in, death practically at her heels.

"Kerry, is that you?" Dr. Roberts called from his office.

"Yes," she said, stepping through the doorway. The doctor was on his computer, clicking angrily at the mouse. Since this was his normal computer habit, Kerry ignored his inability to use most technology and sat in the ragged old chair in front of his desk. "You wanted to tell me something?"

"Hmmm? Oh, yes. I was looking into what else could make a bite radius of that size and—" the doctor cut off his speech, looking up and spotting Michel lounging with his back along the door jamb. "Oh," he said, turning accusatory eyes towards Kerry. "You brought company."

"This is a friend of mine from out of town. We were having supper when you called." Kerry gritted her teeth, already knowing that Dr. Roberts would not say anything with Michel around.

"You know I don't like to share my theories with outsiders." The medical examiner put on his glasses and gave Michel a close look. "You look familiar. Have we met?"

"No," Michel responded easily, "but I lived in town for a while when I was younger. You don't have to worry about me. I'm not the one who's a reporter." He shot Kerry a teasing look, which caused the doctor to purse his lips in thought.

"I don't think of Kerry as a reporter. I think of her as the young student I hired for a summer job who managed to solve one of the cold cases I have from my time working in the City."

Kerry looked back and forth between Michel and the doctor, noticing that they were testing each other using their esteem for her as a measuring post. The battle of testosterone was both amusing and a waste of time, but she knew that neither of them would hold a real conversation until a verdict was reached.

Michel gave Kerry a fond look, one she hadn't seen on his face since the unguarded moments of their brief affair. She knew he was playacting, but it still turned her around. "I've always thought Kerry's talents are being wasted in Brockport. I've tried to convince her quit her job and move on."

The doctor nodded as though he agreed and approved. "How long have you known her?"

This time, Michel paused, though it was barely perceptible. Clearly, he wasn't sure how to answer. He couldn't say they had met in college when he already admitted to living in Brockport when he was younger, and if he was too specific, he risked the doctor figuring it all out, especially since a picture of Ethan Bryne was in one of the files on the desk. Michel wasn't superman, and his stylish glasses probably wouldn't be a foolproof disguise. "Almost a decade," he finally said.

"I've known her for about eight years. She's like a daughter to my wife and I." The doctor's warning to Michel was subtle, but not subtle enough.

"What were you researching?" Kerry asked, cutting in before she had to hear any more lies from Michel. The wounds were four years old and stopped bleeding long ago, but sometimes they still ached. She didn't think she could hear what Michel had to say about her next.

"Oh, right!" Dr. Roberts exclaimed. "I was looking at other primates to see if any matched the bite marks on the two victims. I found a monkey that fits almost perfectly. Let me show you." The doctor stood, quickly bypassing the two of them as he headed towards the morgue. "It doesn't explain the blood loss, of course. But maybe whoever owns the monkey took the blood out beforehand."

"Interesting," Kerry said, trying to keep the scepticism out of her voice.

"I thought it made just as much sense as vampires," the medical examiner told her, standing in front of one of the refrigeration units. "But that was before. Now I'm not too sure. Do you believe in vampires, Kerry?" he asked again.

Kerry hesitated, her eyes going towards the drawer Dr. Roberts was reaching for as he asked his question. Her silence was interrupted by the clean sound of the metal slab rolling out of the wall, the contents barely heavy enough to weigh down the heavy tray. She thought that if her heart was on it in this very moment, it would be heavier than the dead body.

"Let's ask Ethan Bryne, shall we?" Roberts suggested, clearly not looking at the skeletal remains drudged from the river.

"Yes," Michel answered. "I do believe in vampires."

His answer was said so calmly, so matter-of-fact, that Kerry turned to stare at him in disbelief. Was this how Michel dealt with adults he respected? No manipulations, no lies, simply honesty that was both jarring and... well, she didn't know. She couldn't think of an adjective to properly describe how she felt. Surprised? Yes. Distrustful? Yes, if he had taught her anything it was to question him. Pride? Oddly enough, yes.

This all went through her mind in a matter of seconds and then she noticed that Michel's gaze wasn't on her, but on Doctor Roberts, and Kerry realized her mistake in watching him instead of the doctor for his reaction. He would probably be furious at her for hiding it from him, and terrified that vampires existed and one was standing right in front of him, surely ready to kill him now that he had figured out the secret.

Instead of looking fearful or accusatory like Kerry expected, Dr. Roberts looked relieved. He turned his gaze towards her and said, "I knew you didn't kill that man."

Kerry shook her head. "I did. Marsala was convinced that I was a vampire too and he was trying to kill both of us. It was an accident. I just didn't want to die."

"She saved both of us, and probably other innocents who hadn't been dragged into the mess yet." Michel had on his sincere face, but he was being a lot less truthful now than he was the last time he opened his mouth. Kerry's world-view turned back on axis. This was the Michel she expected.

"Like this guy?" Dr. Roberts asked, looking down at the bones.

"Exactly."

"Funny thing is, all the paperwork clearly points to this being Bryne."

Michel smiled and shrugged. Oops, doctor, you caught me there.

"Can I speak to you for a moment Kerry," Dr. Roberts asked, heading back towards his office. Obviously, it wasn't a question. Kerry exchanged a warning look with Michel before following and making sure that she was standing so she could observe the two of them. "Who do the bones belong to?" he asked quietly. There was no doubt in Kerry's mind that Michel was cheerfully listening in on the conversation.

To back up that point, he grinned at her and winked.

She shrugged. "I have no idea. Ethan was taking care of his own disappearing act. I just had to give him enough time to leave."

"You never should have trusted a cold blooded killer like him."

Kerry's eyes narrowed. "He's not a cold blooded killer," she defended. Liar. Liar. "And I didn't trust him. I was in love with him."

"That's worse."

"Look," Kerry said impatiently. "I don't know what kind of ideas you have about him, but he doesn't have to kill every time he feeds – he only takes about a pint of blood."

The medical examiner snorted. "That's obvious. If vampires killed all their victims, there'd be a lot more bodies around."

Kerry bristled at the term victim, but wisely kept her mouth shut.

"How do you know he's not the one responsible for Doug and Lenny and Peter?"

"He's not," Kerry said firmly.

"As far as I'm concerned it takes a particular kind of monster to murder young men and allow young girls to kill for them. That kind of monster could do anything."

"He's not," Kerry responded, her voice a bit more shrill. "I called him for help. He's here because of me! If I hadn't contacted him, he'd still be in Winnipeg." Michel had taken a step towards her when it was clear that the conversation was making her upset, but once she mentioned where he had been living he stopped and gave her an unfathomable look. He met her eyes for a moment, and she was surprised to see the familiar sense of pain reflected in them. Finally, Michel took another step forward, having shaken off the mood and replaced it with a look of determination and politeness.

"Dr. Roberts, will you have a few words with me in your office?" he requested, clearly expecting his request to be met. Just as obvious, he was excluding Kerry from whatever it was he had to say.

Kerry could see them talking through the small window pane in the closed door, occasionally hearing the murmur of voices as their gestures became animated or faces drawn with anger. She wished more than anything that she could hear this conversation, but every time she began to sneak closer to the door, Michel would shoot her a look and she'd go back to browsing through her purse for things to do. She thought about calling Luke or Nelle for a quick conversation, but she didn't want to miss anything in case one of them shouted loud enough to be heard through the heavy door and walls.

They sure didn't make buildings this soundproof anymore. Or maybe it was just the fact that the building needed to be kept at a cool temperature and so had extra thick walls. Either way, the curious side of her hated it with a passion.

It was at least a good half an hour before the two of them shook hands and Michel emerged from the office looking completely unperturbed. "I'll meet you at your car," he told her, heading towards the door. Clearly, it was her turn to have a meeting with Dr. Roberts, and she felt oddly nervous despite the fact she had a high regard for the old man, or maybe it was that esteem which made her care what his reaction was. She felt like Elizabeth Bennet must have when Mr. Darcy tried to ask her father for her hand in marriage, as completely absurd as that comparison was. The doctor wasn't her father, and she certainly didn't care if he gave Michel any approval whatsoever.

Despite this, she still felt relief when Dr. Roberts opened the conversation with "your young man and I have reached an understanding."

Kerry sighed, feeling some of the tension leave her shoulders. "About what?"

"He explained to me that at his age—"

"He told you his age?" Kerry interrupted with amazement.

"No," Dr. Roberts said with a sense of graveness. "But he said if I wanted a quick test to see how well he knew you, to just mention it and you'd jump all over it."

Kerry blushed slightly, knowing there were far more telling ways Michel could prove that he knew her. "I didn't realize that was an issue of discussion," she responded.

"It came up. He was trying to convince me that you'd be safe with him. He was also trying to convince me that my life was probably now in danger and that if I helped him investigate he'd do what he could to keep me safe."

Kerry tried to keep her surprise hidden. It had crossed her mind that the doctor would probably be in danger now that he was let in on the world of vampires, but she hadn't really considered it to be that dire. Still, what really threw her was Michel offering to help someone. She wanted to say that it wasn't like him at all, but then he had kept her with him, perhaps even safe, during the kidnapping eight years ago. At the time she hadn't seen it that way, had seen the whole thing as subtly terrorizing her and wearing her down before he killed her, but eight years gave a girl perspective.

"Do you think I should trust him?" Dr. Roberts finally asked.

"I'd trust him with my life," she said simply and honestly. The truth of it rarely surprised her anymore, even as her rational side rebelled and the little voice in her head told her he'd betray her quicker than he'd kill her. She didn't think so, but at what point during the time they were together four years ago she had changed her mind, she couldn't say.

"That's easy for you to say," Dr. Roberts said critically.

"What do you mean?" Kerry asked with a confused frown.

"Of course you'd trust him. He's clearly in love with you."

"He said that?" she asked, though she had stopped breathing.

"He didn't need to. I saw it when he was talking about you earlier. He had this look in his eye that—" Dr. Roberts broke off, clearly uncomfortable.

Kerry started to breathe again. She was relieved to hear that the clearly in love with you really meant that Michel had managed to fool yet another person into believing the sincerity of his faux expressions. If Michel really had feelings for her, she thought her life would come tumbling down around her. She gave Dr. Roberts a careful smile. "We could really use any information you have. It would probably stop us from breaking in."

"I told him that I would certainly not help him in any way," he said forcefully, "but I had absolutely no objections to passing information on to you."

"Thank you," Kerry said feelingly. She stood to leave, but hovered uncertainly in place as she wondered if she should ask them if everything was all right between them. "I'll see you soon."

"I hope not," he told her. "Not if it means another body." He took off his glasses and pinched the bridge of his nose, clearly exhausted and overwhelmed.

"I'll treat you to lunch," she promised, struck by a strong feeling of kinship. Maybe she'd tell him all about how she met Michel, and they could work on this investigation together. "I have to go, Michel's waiting."

"So that's his name," the doctor mused, putting his glasses back on. "Take care around him."

Kerry didn't bother mentioning that she always did, because the last time she had broken through her own walls, he had shattered her into pieces. Maybe that was why she trusted him with her life – he had already destroyed it once. As she emerged from the building and saw him watching her from down the street, she knew that she could never give up those moments that only still existed in her dreams.

Chapter Text

"Look," Kerry told him as she approached her car. "I have things to do tonight, and you're not on the list."

Michel opened his mouth to respond, but she beat him to the punch.

"And neither is Luke, so just quit it with the innuendoes and sly remarks."

"I wasn't going to say anything like that. I was just going to mention that I'm carpooling with you to the house."

Kerry paused, her hand hovering over the door handle for a moment before giving an internal shrug and getting into the driver's seat. She really should have seen that coming, and this was a little better than showing up at Lucy and Dave's to finding him sitting in his chair, looking exactly the same as he had when they had first met. Kerry knew that would have unnerved her – especially if seeing him there was unexpected. Even with an audience, her heart still would have tripped over itself like a drunken teenager, and he would have known immediately. She could almost see the way he would have raised his glass – a prop he happened to have in this imagined scenario, though she wasn't sure why – to salute her, his infuriatingly smug grin on his lips as he suggested she take a seat.

She possibly got that scene right out of a vampire movie. Dracula anyone?

"It's been a while since I've been in a car with you behind the wheel," he told her. "I'm assuming you've improved since you were 16? And that you did eventually get a valid driver's license, yes?"

Kerry shot him an irritated look, but it broke when she saw him checking the veracity of his seatbelt by tugging on it, with a grim expression on his face. "I'm a pretty good driver. I was then, too, there were just some extenuating circumstances. You see, these crazies were shooting at me and this incredibly cute guy I just saved."

"So would you say you were trying to impress this cute guy?"

Kerry chuckled as she turned on the car. "I'm not sure that was on my mind at the time, considering the bullets and the getaway and all. Plus, I had just risked my life to saw through these ropes tying his wrists with a razor blade and he was kind of bleeding all over my car."

"That's really inconsiderate of him." Michel's hand was still clenched around his seatbelt.

"Are you a nervous passenger?" She asked, slightly surprised to find he might have a personal weakness after all.

"A what?" he asked, relaxing his fist and sliding his hands over his thighs in an attempt to look casual.

"You know how some people are nervous drivers when they're behind the wheel? Well do you get nervous when someone else is driving? Is it a need to be in control, Michel, or do you just not trust anyone else to get you there safely?"

"That's ridiculous." He told her primly.

Kerry smiled. She then lowered her voice into a comforting tone. "Don't worry. You're in good hands."

He opened his mouth, as though to make one of his caustic remarks, and instead closed it again as she deliberately took a corner sharply. She wondered if he knew that the thought he might have a weakness – a not-quite a phobia, but a little more than a quirk – about relinquishing control in a moving vehicle made her heart unclench just a little towards him. Sometimes she forgot that despite the many personas and facades of Michel, there was still a person in there somewhere.

She'd have to be careful to not start thinking of him as human, though, either, because he was anything but.

"I want you to know that I was never using you back then, or whatever it was you thought I did. I think that maybe it's time to clear the air between us and I don't know why, but it just seems like something that needs to be said. Sometimes I still feel bewildered and resentful towards you for leaving my life in such extreme turmoil – and so abruptly— but other times I'll look at a sunrise or be enjoying a quiet meal with my boyfriend, and I'll suddenly be really glad you did what you did. That I'm still human."

Kerry finished her monologue and looked over at him, expecting to see him staring at her, possibly with his inscrutable expression, but more likely with that infernal smile across his lips. Instead, he was staring out the window at nothing. "I'm sorry," he told her finally. "I reacted badly that night. If we're going to clear the air, I think you should know that."

"Okay," Kerry told him, wondering what was up. If it was usually this easy to get an apology out of Michel, she didn't think they would have ever gotten to this place where they were virtual strangers masquerading as former lovers.

"Okay," he echoed, still staring out the window. "I'm glad we have that settled."

But it wasn't, Kerry realized as she pulled up in front of Ethan Bryne's old house. Nothing felt resolved, and judging by the silence in the car for the last five minutes, things might actually be worse between them. Somewhere in there things had gone horribly wrong, as though neither of them had heard the words they actually wanted to hear.

It was unsettling.

x.x.x

Dave waylaid Michel the moment they were through the door, pulling him aside and leaving Kerry to follow Lucy into the living room. Kerry had hesitated on the threshold, wondering if they wanted to talk about personal things or the investigation. If it was the former, she was perfectly comfortable leaving them alone for a few minutes, but if it was the latter, she resented the idea that she had to go sit like a little lady in the parlour while the men spoke business.

Deciding she'd just have to trust that Michel actually wanted her to be aware of everything going on – though that took a great deal of trust, considering his secretive nature – she perched herself on the couch in awkward silence as Lucy watched her.

"Lucy," Kerry directed her conversation, ignoring the two vampires as they talked in shallow tones on the other side of the room. "Have I ever told you how much I love the new color you and Dave painted the house? I mean, I always thought the house was lovely, but now it's so eye catching I just can't take my eyes off it." She shot a quick look at Michel to judge just how much attention he was paying her. She figured he was distracted enough for her to say the next part – not that she didn't think he could hear it, but she didn't think he would call her on it. "When I got back to town, I avoided driving by like the plague, but at some point things just changed and I found myself driving by as often as I could. Sometimes I would just stop and look, and I'm glad I did. I could tell that someone new lived here now, and the house looked so lived in for the first time in a while."

"I'm glad you approve," Lucy responded coldly.

"I'm sorry," Kerry frowned, her attention turning fully back to Lucy at the frosty tones in her response. "Did I say something wrong?"

"No." Lucy seemed to blink into herself, clearing her mind in a way that was obvious. "I'm just distracted and worried right now. We've got a kid, and the longer it takes to find this guy, the more danger my family is in. That's what Dave and Ethan are talking about right now. Dave wants out."

Kerry patted Lucy's arm awkwardly. "He'll understand."

"Who?" Lucy snorted. "Your Michel?" she asked, deliberately giving the name the French pronunciation Kerry used instead of the regular anglicized version he went by with other vampires. "He believes that any kind of personal connections are liabilities. He's so against the idea of a vampire having a family that he looks like he's going to throw up every time he sees my son."

Kerry wondered what Michel looking nauseated looked like, but couldn't really picture it. "Maybe, but he's not evil."

"Kerry?" Michel called out from the doorway of the living room, where he had turned away from Dave and was gesturing towards her. "We're leaving."

Kerry gave Lucy a 'told-you' look as she stood, grabbing her purse from the floor as she walked towards Michel. "That was decent of you," she told him once they were back in the car.

"It wasn't nearly as altruistic as you think," Michel told her, buckling himself in with no signs of trepidation. For some reason, he seemed to take pleasure in reminding her that he wasn't all that nice of a person. It made Kerry think that maybe he was protesting too much, but then she remembered who she was talking to.

"Yeah, because not making someone who is worried about their family chase after a serial killer makes you a complete bastard."

Michel shook his head. "That was just an excuse. Dave's never been that bright. He probably couldn't find the killer if the guy was slicing open his neck right beneath his nose."

"Literally," Kerry couldn't resist inserting, sharing a small grin with him at her corny joke.

"I'm pretty confident that allowing him to investigate from the sidelines won't hurt our progress much. In fact, it might help."

"What progress?" she asked him, realizing as she turned the corner that she was heading back to her apartment without asking him where he wanted to go. "Where am I supposed to be driving you?" The question was asked with a sense of irritation, as she realized she had fallen back on old habits of assuming that where ever it was they were going after dark, the two of them would be going together. It was the little things that caught her up sometimes, like when she heard a sound in the dark and expected to see him, or when he made her laugh and the years seemed to melt away.

"Here's fine," he told her with an amused grin and a knowing look in his eye. She could see the gleam of his white teeth in the glow from the moving street lights as he smiled.

It was on the tip of her tongue to say something abrasive to him and confront him about all the times he made fun of her without saying a word, but instead she held her words, knowing they would only fuel his amusement.

"Oh? Are you living around here somewhere, then?" she asked instead.

"No," he responded, not clarifying as she pulled up in her parking space and got out of the car. She left him sitting there without a word, but by the time she walked around the back of the vehicle he was out, his cool fingers cooling around her wrist.

If she hadn't almost expected he would try to stop her in some way, he would have frightened her. She hadn't seen him move, or heard the car door open or close. He was like a ghost sometimes, only far more dangerous because this dead man could walk, talk, and kill. Kerry looked down at his fingers, then back at his face. "Yes?"

He was silent, looking around for something. "Come on," he said finally, pulling her across the small lot and through a break in a hedge bush. They came out in the public park in the lot next door, and he gave her a gentle shove towards one of the benches.

"Is there something you want to talk about?" she asked, taking a seat. "We could have done that in the car."

"So your boyfriend could come across us on one of his nightly patrols? What would he think, to see us sitting so intimately in a confined space, the windows steamed up from the breath of our passionate... conversation."

Kerry shot him a scornful look, but it was ruined by the way she had to purse her lips to keep from snickering. She couldn't do anything about the amused glint that was sure to be in her eyes. She'd never been very good at lying to him.

"I just wanted to observe Brockport at night," he said finally. "Judge to see if anything takes notice of a couple of young people sitting in a park at night."

"I... see." Kerry responded, her mind playing catch-up with his reasoning. Bait, it told her. The word made her uncomfortable. The idea of the two of them sitting alone in the dark for any other reason made her more so.

"So far the victims don't match either of our descriptions," he reminded her, as though that was a comfort. "And together even less. I just want to see what goes on in Brockport after midnight these days."

She should have pointed out that after midnight wasn't really "day" in the most general sense of the word, just to annoy him. She also should have been interested that his way of finding out what happened in town was to sit on a bench in the middle of what seemed to be nowhere to her and observe. That didn't really surprise her.

"It's after midnight!" she groaned, shooting him a dirty look that wasn't mock anything. Then she realized how like a middle-aged lady her habits had been recently.

"What's wrong Kerry?" Michel asked, his voice mocking. He never was one to pass up an opportunity to rib her a little. It was one of his more annoying traits that she had always found endearing and a little sexy. "You used to be such a party animal, staying up all night. Remember that time you begged me to fuck you over the back of the couch. You seemed to like it too. What happened to her? She was fun."

"She still is fun," Kerry responded, deciding that her best response to him when he was like this was to give it back a little instead of becoming indignant. It might have been the late hour, but that reasoning made complete sense to her. "And I seem to remember you being a little bit of a prude that night, worried you might hurt me. But then I knew the best ways to seduce you. I wonder Michel, if I leaned in and scraped my teeth over your neck, right here, would you make the same noise in the back of your throat that you did that night?"

She ran her finger over the pulse of his neck, leaning towards him in a way that was tempting fate.

"Kerry Nowicki!" Michel said with dark bemusement, and just a little bit of delight. "Apparently there are more dangerous things in the night than a madman with a knife."

Kerry laughed, proud of herself. Then she realized she had actually kind of just propositioned him. A little. "We probably don't even have that kind of physical connection anymore," she protested.

He slid the back of his fingers over her cheeks in a surprisingly intimate gesture for the banter they were sharing. They moved over her lips in a caress, the tip of his middle finger catching on her bottom lip, tugging gently on it as his touch skimmed down her chin. "I don't think that would be a problem."

"No," Kerry breathed, pulling away. She couldn't rid her face of the expression of yearning or regret, so she looked away from him. "It has to be a problem."

"I understand," he told her, but his hand still closed over her wrist again, as though he wanted to say something entirely different.

"I have to go," Kerry said quietly, drawing away from him so softly that it was barely a movement. "Good night, Michel."

x.x.x

I was standing at the bus stop in the freezing rain, the small, sharp shards of it stinging my face as I tried to burrow my chin into the collar of my jacket. I was pretty sure the weather channel had been wrong about the forecast. This was not freezing rain, or even sleet, but some ingenious form of torture thought up by the legions of Hell. I shuffled my feet inside my flats, wondering what had possessed me to wear a pair of summer, or at best early autumn, shoes in the middle of January. Where were my nice, warm boots that clunked heavily when I walked?

Oh yeah, at home where I left them, all nice and warm in the foyer.

Unlike me, Kerry the human popsicle.

I was so involved in my misery of whining in my head about late buses and rain in the middle of winter, that I completely missed his approach from behind. I jumped when he pulled a chunk of frozen snow out of my hair, his breath warm against my cheek. "Come on," he cajoled. "It isn't that bad."

"Maybe not for those of us who don't have body temperatures," I responded, curling my arms around his waist in a hug that was more of an attempt to share warmth with him than a true mirror of my feelings at seeing him here. If I was to do that, my legs would be wrapped around his hips and my mouth fused to his right now. It wasn't that I thought he wouldn't be responsive if I did that at certain times, but not only were we in public at the moment, but it was also a little too tinged in desperation. Since he had shown up here on his own volition, I wasn't going to be the one to send him running away, back to whatever hole or urban condo he crawled out of this time. "But this is the shittiest weather ever."

Michel snorted. "You have it lucky. You should try living in... Canada."

I looked up at him curiously, my cheek slicking against his wet jacket. I was almost sure he was about to say something other than Canada, something that would have been too personal and far beyond the boundaries of his life that he had set up. A year, perhaps. 'You should try living in 1875' or 'You should try living in a time without hot showers' sounded like something an old vampire might say.

Of course, I never had established an age for him. Sometimes I thought he couldn't possibly be that old, just in the way he enjoyed the game. A centuries old vampire couldn't possibly enjoy playing emo, could he? "The only way you could know how cold Canada is is if you lived there when you were human. Is that where you're from? It would explain the French bit." I turned the tables on him, enjoying this game just as much as I had when we first met, even if I would never have admitted it at the time. Maybe, that's why we liked each other. It was all in the mind games.

"Give it up, Ker. You aren't ever going to find out. Now, where are you going tonight that has us standing out in the cold all shivery and wet?" He wasn't shivering, but his hand was rubbing up and down my back as though it helped warm me up. I thought he'd have better luck rubbing himself against my front if he wanted to generate heat.

"Class," I informed him, tilting my chin stubbornly and staring at him.

"Skip it," he suggestion casually.

"I can't just skip class!" I responded to him indignantly, thinking that if he just pressed a little further that I would do anything for him.

"Sure you can," he said slowly, pressing his mouth against mine. My toes curled in my wet shoes, and I was sure they were steaming. His mouth was slow and thorough against my lips and I knew that though the game had changed, we were still playing. We'd be playing until one of us finally gave in, and despite his almost dependable visits to see me, I knew it wouldn't be him. I wanted this too much; the sensation of his lips on mine, my arms resting across his firm shoulders and my breasts pressed against his chest, even through all the layers of clothing, was enough, too much, and far too little contact for me, and my body sung and whispered with pleasure and dissatisfaction. "Let me take you home," he urged.

"Yes," I agreed, breaking away and gently touching my mouth with a gloved hand. I noticed the bus lights in the distance, already past my stop and on to the next one. I glared at him for a moment and slipped my hand into his.

"You know I'm worth it."

x.x.x

When Kerry awoke the next morning she felt refreshed. Her body still felt a bit tired from the long nights she was putting in, but her mind was surprisingly clear. Luke was standing in front of his dresser, his back to her as he took off his uniform. Unlike her, his shoulders were hunched in exhaustion, and he looked defeated.

Kerry grimaced, overcome by guilt at what she had been doing to him for the last two days. There was a certain sense of betrayal behind her actions – not only investigating behind his back, but also spending so much time with her ex-lover – and without telling him a thing about it. And she and Michel, well after last night she had more to feel guilty about, didn't she? "Why don't you come to bed?" she asked, looking at the clock and seeing that it was time for her to get up. That meant he was home at least an hour late.

"I didn't mean to wake you," he told her, turning towards her as he dropped his shirt on the floor and crawled into bed with his pants still on.

"I have to get up anyway," she told him, and her heart hurt a bit to look at him. "But I kept the bed warm for you."

"Thanks," he rumbled from his pillow, but he sounded anything but. Kerry leaned over and kissed his head as she climbed out of bed.

"I'm taking lunch with Dr. R today," she told him. "If we go to that little specialty sandwich shop next to the morgue, I'll pick you up one of those danishes you like." Kerry didn't know why she said it, probably just to reconnect with him before she had to leave for a long day of work, but she immediately fell foolish when he grunted, half asleep.

"Could you try to be quiet this morning," he asked, voice a grumble against the pillow. "I'm on call this afternoon and if we pick up another case I'll have to go in. Try not to get into any car accidents today, kay?"

"Sure," Kerry told him, feeling bad for even the little bit of conversation she had already tried to engage him in that morning.

x.x.x.x

"Dr. Roberts?" Kerry called out, entering the morgue through the front door. It wasn't locked, but then again, he rarely locked it during the day. The day was sunny and surprising warm for spring, but inside the morgue it was the same cool temperature it usually was. This is what had made it one of the best summer jobs she ever had – the lack of sweating beneath the hot sun, or in a stuffy corner of some enclosed building with no windows.

Her stomach rumbled, reminding her that she had skipped breakfast again, and that her eating habits had stopped revolving around a set time. In college, she always knew that the story she was writing was going to be big if she found herself so involved she forgot to grab a sandwich somewhere along the way. She remembered that her editor used to get one of the junior reporters to make sure there were always a bottle of water on her desk and a package of trail mix in the drawer.

No one looked out for her like that anymore. But then again, wasn't she old enough now to look after herself?

Kerry was thinking about that as she entered the autopsy room, only to find it empty. Assuming that there wasn't a body for Roberts to work on today, she turned and headed into his office. At first, she thought that was empty too.

"Doctor Roberts?" Kerry asked, noticing his shoe sticking out from behind the desk at an angle that was impossible for an empty shoe to rest in. She already knew what she would find on the floor from the sinking sensation in her stomach, but she walked around the desk anyway.

He was face-down on the floor, and she could tell from the way his head rested, tilted upwards towards her as if he were straining to look up, that she would find his neck ripped open like the last body. There was so little blood, only a small pool of it around his shoulders, soaking through the same sweater he had been wearing the night before.

He had never made it home.

She didn't touch the body, didn't check to see that he was really dead. Kerry already knew he was. She could also see from the color and consistency of the blood – dried around the edged, congealing in the middle – that he had been dead for a while.

Kerry swallowed the bile rising up in her throat and pulled her sleeves down over her hands. She then rummaged through the notes on his desk, trying to find if any mention of vampires or his conversation with Michel was recorded anywhere. When she couldn't find anything there, she checked the recent documents on his computer.

When she was finished, she retched into the garbage can, her stomach mercifully empty so that she only gagged without throwing up. She then pulled out her cell phone and called the police, leaving the scene of the crime intact.

Chapter Text

"You've reached 457-845-6643: I am unable to take your call at the moment. If you can't remember to leave your name and number in the message, don't expect me to remember it either." The phone beeped and Kerry opened her mouth to talk but no sounds emerged from her lips. She sniffed once and hung up, tossing her phone away from her.

It sat there, and she stared out the windshield of her car, chilled. Luke was talking to another police officer in the doorway in front of the morgue, and Kerry wondered why sharing this with him, drawing comfort from his solid shoulder, just wasn't enough.

She couldn't catch her breath.

A moment later, she reached across the passenger seat to retrieve her phone and dialled again. The stupid, insulting message replayed, and this time she was able to find her voice, though it was scratchy from her effort not to cry. "Michel, it's Kerry," she said, breaking all the rules. "There's another body, it's... I'm sorry," her voice broke. "I can't."

Kerry hung up the phone, clutching it tightly in her hand as spasms ran down her body, her stomach clenching tightly in anguish and fury. Her emotions were unravelling, her breath coming in short, choppy spurts as she hyperventilated, but she didn't cry. The bright mid-afternoon light shone through her windshield window, its presence a parody of safety. She felt as though the world would never be right again, and both grief and fear gnawed on her insides. This was her fault, she realized. She should have investigated quicker. She should have warned everyone around her of the dangers.

She bowed her head over the steering wheel, her body physically shaking. Tears weren't running down her cheeks, but her eyes and sinuses felt on fire from the effort of keeping them inside. She worked on controlling her breathing, listening to the steady in and out of air from her lungs. Kerry started, jumping backwards in her seat and her neck snapping back as someone rapped on the window next to her head.

"Are you alright?" Luke asked.

"I'm fine," she told him, giving him her most reassuring smile. It was less convincing than usual, but she wasn't in the mood to give it an honest try.

He put his head to the side, observing her. He looked convinced that she was telling the truth, and almost critical of her because of it. "I expected you to be more upset," he told her. "You're not crying."

"No," Kerry said, battling the urge to laugh hysterically. It was true, she wasn't crying, but it had absolutely nothing to do with lack of emotions. He was her boyfriend. He should know that by now. "I'm not crying. Do you know why I'm not crying? It's because I barely ever cry. Dr. Roberts deserves more than a few tears from me. He deserves respect and he deserved his killer to be found. Shedding tears is just a waste."

"You are upset," Luke observed.

"Of course I'm upset!" Kerry railed against him. "He was my friend. I'll never visit him in the morgue again and watch as he does an autopsy, chatting about nothing in particular, or how odd the size of his patient's liver was."

Luke got an odd look on his face. "I never understood why you went there. It was creepy."

"It was creepy?" she screeched. "You did NOT just say that to me."

Luke gave her a beseeching look, one that said he didn't quite understand why she was yelling, but he was willing to take the blame so long as she stopped.

Kerry drew in a ragged breath. "I can't deal with you right now," she told him, starting her car.

"Would you like me to drive you back to work?" he offered.

"No," Kerry said curtly, pressing her foot to the gas. She wasn't going back to work. She could feel her tenuous grasp on her emotions breaking, and she needed to be home alone when it happened.

x.x.x

Kerry awoke to fingers lightly brushing against her cheek. The touch was gentle and caressing, removing the hair stuck against her wet skin. She obstinately kept her eyes shut, not wanting to rejoin reality just quite yet. At first, she assumed it was Luke, though he was rarely that gentle, and she frowned at the memory that she was still angry at him. Then her face relaxed when she recognised the coolness of the touch and the strength in the finely shaped fingers.

Pianist hands.

Kerry opened her eyes to see Michel kneeling beside her bed, one of his strong forearms braced along her mattress in front of him. His other hand was tickling along her hairline in an unconscious movement.

"What happened to make you cry?" he asked, brow furrowed in sincere concern – or at least a perfect mask of worry.

Kerry found she couldn't look at him, worried he would draw her into his gaze. Her eyes caught the time on her bedside clock, and she was surprised to find it only a few minutes after sunset. "Did you get my call?" she asked.

Michel gave a sharp nod. "Who was the latest victim? Someone in your family? Your boyfriend?" She could still hear him ask what had happened that would cause her to shed tears, and she was thankful at least he understood.

Kerry shook her head at both. "Dr. Roberts," she said quietly, glad she didn't have to raise her voice for him to hear.

"I'm sorry," he said earnestly. "I know you were friends with him."

Kerry nodded again, giving him a smile where her lips turned down more than they did up. "He was... a good man," she told him. "When I... when you... eight years ago he had the police officer in charge of my case bring me into the morgue and he forced me to see Marsala's body. He terrified me, going on and on about my DNA being under my victim's fingernails, and forced me to show him the bruises on my arm. At the end of the interview, he turned to the cop and said 'It was self-defence. I'll put it in my report. Don't arrest this one, officer Atherton.'" Kerry finally looked Michel in the eye again, her voice now breaking due to her grief. She was going to cry again. "He knew," she told him. "He knew there was something wrong with my story, but he backed me up anyway."

"Go ahead and cry," Michel said, stroking her hair. "It's ok."

Kerry shook her head. "It's not ok. I haven't cried since—" she broke off, not wanting him to know the last time she had cried. Her pride wouldn't allow her to even hint that it had been because of him.

"Go ahead," he urged gently.

It was too late, she was already crying.

"He was a good man," he reiterated. "A good friend to you."

Kerry sobbed, her chest heaving with the effort to breathe. She barely made any sound, but her face reddened and nose started to run as she cried wildly into the crook of her elbow and her pillow. She had pulled away from him, and he had removed his hand from her hair. She couldn't seem to get enough air into her lungs. Blindly, she groped for Michel's hand, twining her fingers with his.

"Shhh," Michel soothed, sliding on the bed and gathering her in his arms. She cried on his shoulder, the weight on her chest loosening as she relaxed, and she finally stopped crying altogether. His hand was still stroking the back of her head, and he was mumbling words of support and encouragement to her as she drifted in a state of post-weep lethargy. "Don't you feel better?" he asked.

"No," she mumbled with a pout, drifting off to sleep with the sound of his masculine chuckle in her ear.

x.x.x

Michel never stayed the night. Every time he arrived at my place he would be there for an hour, three at the most, and then leave as I was sleeping. It became to be a norm, something I just took for granted. It changed the night I was hit by a car.

I had been following a lead. I was wearing my black outfit and it was dark out, so dark the car didn't see me and I was so focused on getting answers, I barely saw it in time to dodge.

The bumper hit my leg and I flew up onto the hood of the car, my shoulder stopping on the windshield. Someone was screaming, people on the sidewalk and other cars started to crowd around. As I laid there, stunned and unable to breathe for moments, I thought that it would be just my luck if I died young.

It just wouldn't be tonight.

It took the emergency personnel seven minutes to respond. I was incredibly glad I hadn't been lying there, dying, or I probably would have bled out while they were finishing up that one last glazed donut or whatever it was that kept them from attending to me immediately.

I knew I would be ok when my first thought was that someone should investigate this and make sure that any problems with the ambulance response service were brought to light. I'd write up the article myself, I reflected as the flashing lights finally arrived at the scene. By this time I had rolled off the hood of the car and was sitting on the curb. I could feel the chill down to my bones, and my injured leg stiffened painfully.

I managed to get up and move towards the back of the ambulance when the medic asked me to.

The EMT shone a light in my eyes, poked at my ribs, and told me my leg wasn't broken. They cleaned up the cut on my hand that could only have come from the car hood and recommended I go to the emergency room to see a doctor.

"No thanks," I told them, hopping off the back of the ambulance and heading for the nearest bus stop. My hip felt like it was on fire, and I couldn't tell if my entire leg was numb or if it was one giant drumstick of throbbing pain. Still, I gritted my teeth and tried my best not to hobble obviously as I made my way home.

I really desperately wanted a bath, a handful of painkillers, and a good night sleep. In that order. Instead, I opened my door to find Michel sitting on my couch, one of my US Weekly magazines in his hands.

"Did you know Brad Pitt left Jennifer Anniston for Angelina Jolie?" he asked in mock horror.

"Yes, well, that magazine is a bit old," I told him as I stepped into the room.

I could see his knuckles tense and the pages of the tabloid crinkled around his fingers. His face was still hidden from me, but I could tell he was suddenly on the alert.

"What happened to you?" he asked quietly.

"I got hit by a car," I responded nonchalantly. "EMTs say leg's not broken. They didn't see reason to take me to the hospital themselves, so really it's nothing."

Michel threw the magazine to the floor and stood, his eyes furious. "And you didn't insist to see a doctor? You could have some serious internal bleeding."

"I'm fine," I promised him, unable to help the fond look my eyes gave him at his concern. "All that really hit was my leg. The car wasn't going very fast."

"There's extensive bruising," he told me, kneeling in front of me. His fingers hovered gently over my hip before moving down my leg. "The car hit you here," he told me, focusing on the painful area right above my ankle. "The bone is probably bruised. And then you landed here," his focus was once again on my hip and the side of my thigh. "Pretty hard, at that."

"I know. I was there."

He inhaled deeply, his nose around my stomach area. "No internal injuries that I can tell." He stood and looked at my eyes, his fingers holding open my eyelid as I tried to blind at him. He then felt around my skull. "Did you hit your head?"

"No."

Of course, he didn't take my word for it. "You have no idea the number of people who walk away from accidents every day because they think they're ok and then drop dead later."

"I'm fine!" I promised him as he clinically assessed my head and then my neck. "But you know what, I did just think of something more relaxing than a bath..." She gave him a meaningful look and a smirk.

Michel stood back, looking slightly incredulous. "You're injured!"

"I'll live," I promised.

He crossed his arms over his chest and looked stern. "You're taking that bath. It would do you some good, even if I have to put you there myself."

And he did. He ran the water and helped me into the tub, turning off the light so I could relax. He took care of everything, including giving me a cold glass of water to chase down the painkillers he found in the medicine cabinet. And then the miraculous happened: I awoke three hours later to find him in bed beside me, an open book held on his chest right above the arm I had curled around his waist.

That was the first time he spent the night, but it wasn't the last.

x.x.x

Kerry inhaled sharply, awakening almost immediately. Her cheek was pressed against a familiar shoulder, and she could feel his arm tighten reflexively around her as though it belonged there. Her heart tightened in her chest at the novelty of finding him still by her side, and she stretched against him with a slight grin on her face, moving in the way he likened to a panther. He enjoyed it when she did that, brushing her toes against his and lifting her face towards him for a kiss, pressing her entire body suggestively alongside his. Kerry opened her eyes when he didn't oblige her and found him observing her with a disconcerting frown on his face.

"Oh my God," Kerry gasped, pulling away from him and rolling off the other side of the bed. She stood, staring down at Michel in surprise. Not because she hadn't known it was him, but because she had reacted that way even though she was perfectly aware of who was next to her. "I'm sorry. For a moment I thought we were still... it was still four years ago. I didn't mean to provoke you like that." She pulled her arms around her middle, feeling her whole world crumble around her. For a moment in his arms, everything had been right again. If it was four years ago, she reflected, none of this would have happened and Dr. Roberts would still be alive.

"If I thought you meant it, I would have kissed you," he informed her as he gracefully rolled out of bed, his movements not hindered by human awkwardness. He gave her a concerned look. "Why don't you go back to bed? I'll get you a glass of water and a sleeping pill."

"I'm not tired," she said stubbornly, her voice unnaturally quiet.

"Hence the sleeping pill," he told her, an amused smile pulling at the sides of his mouth.

"I'm not tired," she reiterated more shrilly, feeling his humour was entirely inappropriate for the situation. "And I'm not being overly emotional either. I want to find Dr. Roberts' killer, and I want to find him tonight. No more flirting with me, no more fooling around. Either you get serious, or you leave."

"Okay," he said with a shrug. "No more pretences. Tonight we go hunting."

"I want to be bait," Kerry told him, yanking open the nightstand drawer so hard the contents scattered across the flood. She ignored the lubricant and condoms and went straight for the gun. "Do you see the ammo anywhere?" she asked, and when he picked the box up off the floor with no comment as to the other contents strewn around them, she knew he would keep his promise.

"No arguments for that, either?" she asked, handing him the gun as she moved into the living room and grabbed her jacket. This time she opened her own door, barely waiting for him to grab it from her before she let go and continued down the hall.

"You've always been bait," he told her. "Though in this instance I'm not sure you'll attract someone hunting middle aged men."

Kerry pressed the button to the elevator in her building, though she rarely ever used it, and stood impatiently waiting for the doors to open. "I figure I'll just sit alone on a bench looking helpless," she told him.

"I'd go for you." At her look, he hid a smile and continued, "I'm saying that purely as an evil being who hunts young girls. You'd be an ideal target. But once again, I'm not sure the person we're hunting will take bait like that."

"Well you certainly aren't a middle aged man, either, and there is no way I'm putting my father in danger." Kerry snapped. "Do you know anyone who could help? Oh gee, I used to know Dr. Roberts, but he's dead now."

Michel sighed as though he knew this wasn't going to go particularly well and followed her on the elevator. "You aren't going to do anything suicidal, are you?" he asked.

"No way. In fact, if you see someone approach me you can just shoot first and ask questions later, that's how not suicidal I am."

"I most certainly will NOT," Michel expressed. "But if I see someone trying to rip half your neck off, I'll make sure to act."

"Congratulations on once again being proactive," Kerry sniped sarcastically. "I'll be sitting on that bench over there if you feel the need to hold up your end of the bargain." Kerry moved away from him, sitting on the cold bench as her breath turned foggy on the cool spring evening air. She was fuelled by anger and grief, and stayed still on the one spot due to pride. As the signs of life in the town began to dwindle, each bedroom light turning out and passing cars becoming infrequent, she tried to block out the cold and the isolation and remain focused. An hour after sitting down, her phone rang. Kerry jumped, not expecting the interruption in the quiet air.

"What?"

"You're angry at me," Michel said softly. She couldn't see where he had gone and had taken it for granted that he had left her to her foolishness.

"I'm not," she denied.

"You think I could have done something to save Dr. Roberts."

"You promised him," she hissed. "You said you'd keep him safe."

"I said I'd try to keep him safe, and I was talking about with vampires capable of rational thought. I don't see how you expected me to foresee something like this!"

"It's pretty frigging obvious that he fit the profile and was deeply involved in the case. You should have had Dave or someone keeping an eye on him." Even as she said the words, the pit in her stomach grew because she hadn't seen it either, even as she accused him. Rationally, Kerry knew that it was all her fault. If she hadn't killed Marsala, or if she hadn't come back to live in Brockport, or if she hadn't brought Michel to him, then Dr. Roberts might still be alive. So she became more furious with Michel, since he was the driving force behind all those "ifs."

"I'm not superman," Michel snapped back. "I don't know where you're getting this idea that I'm here to serve you. You made it impossible for me to ignore the situation when you called and made it my responsibility, and instead of resenting you for it I tried to work with you. I'm done!"

"Fine," Kerry snarled. "You're right. I never should have called, and I certainly shouldn't have—" She cut herself off and hung up, getting up off her bench and marching for the front door of her building without finishing her sentence.

"Kerry!" Michel called out, popping up from behind the bushes next door. She ignored him as she wretched open the heavy doors of her apartment building and stalked inside. This time, she took the stairs up to the third floor, getting even more furious once she realized he hadn't followed her inside. That's it, Kerry decided, she couldn't deal with the rollercoaster ride of Michel anymore. She was just starting to feel as though they might make it as friends, after all, when he had to go say she was a nuisance and he wasn't there to actually help but only because he didn't have a choice.

"Bugger," Kerry muttered, arriving at her apartment slightly winded from the climb. She still wasn't tired, and though regret and grief gnawed at her stomach and raced through her mind in an unending circle, she knew she was all cried out. Instead, she grabbed her BlackBerry out of her pocket and hurled it across the room, watching in satisfaction as it slammed into a vase of faux silk flowers on one of the end tables and caused the entire thing to shatter and cascade over onto the floor in a waterfall of fake flowers, decorative sand, and glass. Kerry inhaled and then exhaled, feeling marginally better as she stripped off her jacket and headed into the bathroom for a hot bath, her feet crunching satisfyingly over the shards of glass.

Chapter Text

I had been crouched in the bushes for an hour before it started to rain, not the pleasant sort of misting that someone spying with a camera could ignore, but heavy drops of water that rapidly fell from the sky in what could only be described as a shower. Since I had checked the weather at least three times before leaving the comfort of my apartment with my amateur reporter kit – containing a camera, a voice recorder, and numerous pens and pads of paper, along with a chocolate bar and a thermos of instant coffee – and the forecast had most definitely not called for rain, I was slightly pissed. This is it, I thought to myself after some choice cursing, this is the moment that will define you as a serious reporter or not. I wasn't completely sure it was my mettle, or stubbornness, or simply a sense of laziness (I was already here, and already wet), but I decided to stay in position at least long enough to get my picture and my article before slinking back home for a hot bath and preventive cold medication.

Though the heavy rain beating against the bushes created enough noise to hide a stampede of elephants, I was still aware of his approach. It could be because I noticed the headlights of his car slow down as it passed the house and my heart rate sped up at the idea of one of the neighbours noticing me skulking around. I had taken precautionary measures and wore black, but I hadn't done anything to cover my clearly white skin. Dark face paint would have been noticeable on the bus I had to take to get here, and ski masks itched.

I would never make it as a bank robber.

Of course, the more likely possibility of why I noticed him was because I always seemed to be attuned to when he came within a ten foot radius of me. He hated that. Apparently his habits were weirder than mine, and he found the inability to stalk me frustrating.

He crouched beside me and gave me a good look, borderline on staring. Finally he smiled slightly and gave a brief shake of his head in disbelief. "The money shot is from a tree in the back," he told me, gesturing for the camera.

"Shhh," I hissed. Then added, "I just need a picture of them emerging from the front door."

He took the camera anyway, disappearing into the night like some kind of vampire. I amused myself with possible headlines as I waited for him to return: Dean Eats in with Underage Student , or Dean caught with Hand in the Cookie Jar . Well, titles were the reason the campus newspaper had an editor.

There was a flash of light from the backyard and a scream of rage from the house. Michel came barrelling around the corner, frantically gesturing to his right as he cut into the wooded lot next door. "Shit," I cursed, grabbing my bag and crashing after him, my flight far less graceful than his was. I had never seen Michel run before, but he quickly put space between us as I struggled not to trip over an exposed root and fall in a wet, muddy heap to the forest floor and probably poke out an eye. Chivalry, apparently, was dead when it came to running away from a former tenured professor who may or may not own a twelve gauge. By the time I reached the other side of the lot, he already had his car started and passenger seat opened so I could jump in.

Immediately after my bottom hit the seat, he was off, putting his foot to the gas and racing down the street as though we were being chased by the police already. "Isn't this overkill?" I panted, clutching the strap of my bag tightly to my chest as I wheezed. Note to self: join a gym.

"Are you crazy?" he asked, finally slowing down.

"Is that rhetorical?"

"Was that the Dean of your school? You're going to be kicked out for this, or maybe he'll take your 4.0 GPA and slice it in half. Good luck graduating with that."

"Maybe," I muttered, not quite paying attention to him as I grabbed the camera from between the two front seats and took a look at the digital screen readout from the last picture.

"Are you really that naive that you don't think there'll be consequences? Why do you think no one has done this article before? He's probably been at this for the past twenty years."

I didn't quite hear this either. I was too busy staring at the picture he had taken from what had to be a hard-to-reach perch. My eyes got wide as I took in the picture, and then turned the camera by ninety degrees to see it at another angle. Wow, I thought, this was probably a monumental moment in my life. No one else would ever get a picture this awesome, not even a tabloid magazine. "Pull over!" I said sharply.

"Don't tell me the picture didn't turn out," he said, clearly put out as he pulled the car over to the curb. "Because I might be here to serve, but I'm not going back there."

I grabbed the collar of his wet sweater and yanked him towards me, probably permanently stretching the material. "You're the best," I told him, kissing him before he could get recover his balance. "I'm pretty sure I'll have to love you forever for this."

x.x.x

"Kerry."

Kerry awoke to the steady plink, plink, plink of water dripping from the tap and into the now tepid water of her bath. She moaned groggily, sitting up and wincing as the cool water lapped against her chest. "Are you here to apologize?" she asked, finally opening her eyes. "Oh," she said with surprise, finding Luke standing over her with her towel opened for her to step into.

"I fell asleep," she reflected softly, standing and allowing him to cocoon her in warmth. He enveloped her in his arms, rubbing his palms up and down her back.

"I am sorry," he whispered in her ear. "I didn't mean to be insensitive about Dr. Roberts."

"It's been forgotten," she promised, yawning widely. "What time is it?"

"Just after three," he told her, reaching down in order to lift her off her feet. "They rearranged some shifts today so I could get off work early after pulling the double.

Kerry settled her head on his shoulder. Here was Luke, her boyfriend, taking care of her in a way that no one had ever tried before. "I'm sorry if I've seemed a little distant lately," she said, honestly contrite. Since Ethan's body had shown up, she had been putting Luke second while living in the past. She wasn't going to do that anymore.

"I am too. My new work schedule has been rough on both of us."

"Let's fix that," she murmured against his chest. "Let's—" she cut off as he dropped her on the bed. She bounced, half expecting him to deliberately fall on top of her, but when he didn't she lifted her head and glanced at him. "What are you doing?"

"Fixing it," he told her, rummaging through his sock drawer. "I was going to wait for a romantic setting to do this," he told her, pulling out a small velvet bag. "I'm in love with you, and I don't see myself ever not being in love with you – even if you are a reporter. So will you marry me?"

Kerry regarded him with wide eyes, noting for a split second that he was still wearing his uniform and she was dressed in a towel. It hadn't been what she had pictured from a proposal, either. "Yes," she said, not giving it another moment to think about her decision. "Yes!" She giggled as he crossed the room and slipped the diamond on her finger, holding it up to admire the sparkle in the lamp light. In that moment she was happy and carefree, newly engaged and in love. Nothing could take it away.

"Uhhhn," Nelle muttered groggily into the phone. "Mffg hrrow, mrng."

"Wake up," Kerry told her, twirling the phone cord around her finger. She was standing in the kitchen with the laminate floor cool beneath her bare feet. She couldn't keep the smile off her face. "Breakfast at the coffee shop across from your place in 30 minutes."

"Why?" Nelle asked, finally forming real words. Kerry took that as a good sign.

"It'll be worth it, I promise."

"Do I need camera?" Nelle asked, not exactly the brightest bulb in the box, particularly before coffee.

"Nope," Kerry told her, hanging up.

Twenty five minutes later, Kerry had two large coffees on the table in front of her, and a plate full of fattening breakfast delicacies. The danishes were a peace offering, the coffee just plain necessary.

"What is it?" Nelle asked, grabbing her cup and gulping down the steaming liquid. "This better be good. I swear to God that if you woke me up half an hour early for any reason other than life and death, I'm going to – ooo, danishes."

Kerry picked up her coffee cup so Nelle could see the ring gleaming on her finger. Kerry figured she'd notice from the weird angle of her hand alone, considering Nelle had an artistic eye for detail and all that.

Of course, she didn't notice.

They sat in silence for a few moments, Nelle looking at her expectantly and not a little hostile, before Kerry finally sighed.

"I'm engaged!" she finally said, exasperation evident in her voice as she showed her hand.

"Oh my God!" Nelle said, grabbing Kerry's hand to look at the ring. "Look at this ring. It's lovely. I can't believe Luke finally popped the question. I mean, sure I thought the two of you would get married eventually, but I was starting to wonder if—"

"You helped pick out the ring, didn't you?" Kerry asked, noticing a distinct lack of honest surprise in Nelle's response. She had a lot of experience knowing when someone was lying, especially with people far more skilled than her best friend.

"Do you like it?" Nelle asked sheepishly.

"It is lovely," Kerry told her, staring at the ring critically. It was a round cut diamond set in white gold – a safe choice. She'd always thought that if a man bought her a ring there would be something special about it, but in the face of reality, she knew that was a foolish expectation.

Nelle was watching her look at the ring, and a small frown appeared between her eyebrows. "What are you thinking for your wedding? In the Spring? Sooner – maybe Christmas?"

Kerry shrugged. "I haven't really thought of it. He just proposed last night, so I mean there hasn't really been any time considering we went to bed after that. Christmas is definitely too soon, this year anyway. But maybe a night in December next year."

She didn't want to closely examine why she thought it had to be night. She wasn't even sure they were still friends.

She didn't want to think about that, either.

Kerry picked up one of the pastries and savagely bit into it.

After more small talk about wedding plans, the two of them left for work. Gallant was far more observant than Nelle, noticing the ring right off the bat and nodding his congratulations.

Kerry shoved the engagement into the back of her mind, working on her article about a new gallery show and following that up with an update for the Brockport Murder assignment. It was dark by the time she sent both off to the editor, and left for the night.

"Get in the car," he demanded, pulling up beside her and hollering out the opened passenger side window. Kerry ignored him and continued walking down the street, her heels smacking smartly against the pavement. She didn't need him to ruin her euphoria right now, so she continued to ignore him. "Kerry," he said sharply. "Get in the car."

She finally stopped, looking at him dead-on. "You said you were done with me," she told him. "So be done." She turned and marched into the park where he couldn't follow in a vehicle. Usually, she would avoid the darkened sidewalks and wide expanses of trees and bushes for the safer street-side walkways, but in Brockport, even with a deranged vampire on the loose, it was very unlikely that she would be attacked. She quickened her speed at the sound of a car door slamming.

"Would you wait up," he called from a few feet behind her, though he certainly didn't need her to slow down in order to catch up. "I'm trying to apologize to you."

Kerry spun around, her jacket flaring dramatically around her. She was too angry to notice the beauty of the motion. How dare he? "I don't need an apology," she told him unemotionally. "I'm not sure why I ever expect you to be different, but I think you should know that this time I want you to leave."

"You don't mean that."

Kerry jerked her purse back on her shoulder and observed him closely, wondering why she thought he sounded disbelieving. Her ears must be deceiving her. "Michel," she began wearily. He tensed, eyes narrowing as he took a step towards her.

"What the hell is on your hand?" he asked coldly, sharp reflexes bridging the gap between them as he grabbed her arm before she could move away. His grip was like a vise on her flesh, and he violently brought the diamond into view between them. Kerry tried to jerk her arm out of his grasp, glaring at him when he held tight.

"It's a ring," she told him, eyes defiant.

"You're engaged?" he asked, fingers tightening around her wrist.

Kerry nodded sharply. "To Luke."

"Congratulations," he bit out. "Does your fiancé know you're still in love with me?"

"You arrogant prick!" Kerry gasped, kicking him in the shin and attempting to rip her arm away from his bruising grip.

He grabbed her around the waist, forcefully wrenching her off her feet and fiercely kissing her, their teeth clanking sharply together. For a second, she clung to his shoulder and gave in to him, enjoying the memorable feel of his mouth violently pressing against hers. The sensation of his teeth biting into her bottom lip shot awareness through her body and she pushed away from him, bringing her left, ringed, hand up to slap him soundly across the face.

Michel gingerly touched his mouth, finger coming away with the dark gleam of blood. The way her lips ached, she wasn't sure whether it was hers or his. Without thought, he licked it from his finger and she drew in a sharp breath. She couldn't look away from his judgemental gaze.

"I'm happy," she finally said, taking another step backwards and observing him for what had to be the last time. Realizing the futility of it, she turned on her heel and walked away from him. She didn't say goodbye.

"This isn't what you want!" he called out after her, but she didn't look behind her to see him standing in the middle of the path, watching her leave.

Chapter Text

"Hey," Kerry called out, placing her purse on the hallway table, as she usually did, and ignoring the mail piled there, as was also her habit. "I'm home," she said with a smile as Luke looked up from the laptop he had balanced on his lap. She moved into the room, giving him a soft, leisurely kiss with her hand curled gently in his soft, but short, hair. She pulled away, settling on the couch by his side, and feeling her heart trip gleefully as he casually placed an arm around her waist. "So, what's for supper?"

Luke raised his eyebrows, though his eyes remained on the screen of his computer. Kerry wasn't sure what he was looking at, exactly, but she knew it wasn't porn, or if it was then the formatting of the site looked surprisingly conservative. Luke finally turned to look at her, his eyebrows still hovering somewhere closer to his hairline than they usually rested. "Tonight's take-out night," he reminded her, clearly affronted she forgot.

"I know," Kerry said in her own defence, but in truth, it had completely slipped her mind. "But if I hadn't, then there's an excellent explanation. Like all the excitement that's been going on recently."

Luke gave her a look she couldn't read, which wasn't completely strange, but she had grown quite adept at figuring out half the things he was thinking over the year or so they had been together. She expected him to say something like 'there's no reason to forget take-out night' or 'if you don't understand the importance of take-out night, then I don't think I can marry you.' Instead, he took the hand with the ring on it and brought it up to his mouth and kissed her bejewelled finger.

Kerry gave him a goofy grin.

"I'm thinking pizza."

"Sure," Kerry responded. "Extra cheesy?"

"Of course. It's an affrontal to pizzas everywhere not to get extra cheese. And pepperoni. And maybe onions."

"No onions," Kerry said quickly and firmly. She wasn't all too fond of onions on her pizzas.

"Oh yeah?" Luke asked, giving her a leer and raising his eyebrows in a lewd, playful manner.

Kerry giggled. "You know I just don't like them on my pizza."

"I know," he said with a meaningful smile. "Which is why I already ordered a large pizza without them before you arrived. You know how slow the pizza place is on take-out night."

Kerry gave him a confused glace. She had thought suggesting pizza was unpredictable of her, or at least an original thought. He must have planted the idea in her head at some point, she thought cynically. Maybe in the last week he had said something like "I'm craving pizza" and it had stuck in her head, so that when it was her turn to figure out a meal for them to get, pizza was the obvious choice.

"You always get pizza the week after I order Chinese," he explained with a half-smile, poking her in the side teasingly and then grabbing her around the waist to slide her closer to him. "Now come here and see this. What do you think about the French Riviera?"

"Cote d'Azur," she corrected automatically, looking at the website displayed on his computer screen. "I think it's beautiful," she told him honestly, looking at the picture of beautiful cerulean seas. It was beautiful, but that particular shade of blue coupled with the location on the French shores did something strange to her stomach, though she was doing her best not to think about it.

"I was thinking it would be a great place to honeymoon," Luke told her, looking intently at her face as she gave the ocean view another look. Her stomach turned over again, and she knew what it meant this time. She couldn't keep denying it, unless she wanted to give in to the idea of visiting France.

Without him.

"I don't think so," Kerry mumbled. "Why not the Caribbean instead? It's pretty much the same, only closer and probably cheaper."

"But you love French things," Luke responded with a disconcerted frown. "You minored in French Studies in college."

Yeah, and look where that got her: a constant reminder of her stupid lovelorn obsession on her transcripts; turning down a honeymoon to a place she would love to visit; and that slightly hurt look on Luke's face when he realized that his suggestion had fallen flat and had failed to elicit excitement of any kind.

"There are French things on the Caribbean."

"I was thinking a cruise and not going transatlantic kind of takes the fun out of it."

"A cruise," Kerry said in delight, over emphasizing the excitement in her voice because she felt wretched for disappointing him already. They weren't even married yet. She wasn't quite lying with what she said next, but it was far more forced than it should have been. "I would love to go on a cruise with you," she squealed. "How did you know?" Kerry tucked her knees under her as she turned to kiss his cheek and let her head fall to his shoulder. Beneath the warmth of his chest she could feel his heart beating, and it was gratifying to know the rhythm was for her.

"I love you," she said after he had tucked her up close to her side and subtly smelled her hair.

"You're wearing Eternity today," he guessed.

Kerry responded by pressing her lips against his neck, breathing in his scent. He was all healthy, vital male with an undercurrent of sweat and live flesh. She loved the smell of his neck, especially so soon after he had shaved. It gave her a light-headed buzz to breathe him in, and her hand was worming its way under his shirt as a knock rapped on the door.

"Pizza's here!" Luke said with glee as he disentangled himself.

Kerry sighed, wondering what it was about men which caused them not to notice you were seducing them unless you put your hand down their pants. Especially when food was involved. She sat up and watched him as he placed the box on the table and grabbed some paper plates.

"How hungry are you?" she asked as he peeled a few cheesy slices out of the box, the toppings oozing in strings.

Luke looked at her from over the plates he was holding, a clearly appreciative gleam in his eye as he looked between her and the pizza and then back to her. "I do like cold pizza," he responded thoughtfully.

Kerry snorted, slightly amused. "I guess it depends on which you like more," she said. "Warm pizza or warm sex. Alternatively, I guess you could put it as cold pizza or no sex, because no matter how much you brush you can never get the taste of pepperoni off your breath and I don't like tasting it a second time around."

"Hey!" he said affronted, but made up his mind and dropped the pizza back into the box and advanced towards her.

Kerry giggled, getting up off the couch and backing up towards the bedroom. Her eyes showed amusement as he pretended to lunge towards her and she shrieked with laughter as she dodged him, turning to run towards the door. Luke caught up with her just past the threshold, his strong arms encircling her waist as he hauled her back against his chest. Kerry pretended to resist, weakly kicking him with her heels as he swept her long hair aside and gently scraped his front teeth over her neck.

Kerry shivered, turning towards him and looping her arms around his neck. She kissed him softly, allowing him to deepen the embrace by tilting her head backwards and brushing his tongue across her lower lip. She ran her hands over his broad shoulders, fingers toying at the collar of his shirt as she attempted to unfasten the first button. She was suddenly desperate for the feel of his skin against hers, and she pressed back against him, gently nipping at his lips as she spread open his shirt and shifted her attention to his jaw. As she ran her tongue over the pulse in his neck, she inhaled deeply, feeling the power of his scent curl her toes. She wanted to rip the rest of his shirt off and throw him onto the bed. She wanted to bite down and make him jump beneath her desperate hands. Instead, she licked her way down to his collarbone and finally finished unbuttoning his shirt, spreading it open so her fingers could tickle across his stomach.

Feverishly, she moved on from his chest, her hand sliding down to the waistband of his pants. Luke grabbed her by the hair, forcing her mouth back up to meet his in a heated kiss. Her hand slipped inside his jeans, the stone of her ring accidentally scraping against his erection.

Luke hissed, pushing her backwards onto the bed.

When it was over, Kerry sighed in contentment, stretching herself against Luke's warm body. He murmured into her hair and she smiled, suddenly exhausted and spent from good sex. She snuggled against Luke, and he hummed back to her as she drifted, slowly, off to sleep.

x.x.x

"Look," I said in a prickly tone, "you're just going to have to wait until I've finished this assignment." I gave him a cold look, narrowing my eyes as I noticed him fiddling with the cheap glass award I had won for investigative journalism at the campus paper. I had also won 'cutest journalist,' but it wasn't quite as dignified, even if I am equally as proud of it. That one was on a bottom shelf where it wasn't immediately visible and I could see as his curious perusal moved closer to it. "Michel," I warned in a stern voice.

It was too late, his excellent eyesight had already read the inscription on the second piece of glass and he quirked a grin at me. Insolently, he straightened with his hands carelessly shoved in his pockets, the image of casual. I almost expected the pose to be a trick. "Cute," he commented. "What's the assignment on?"

"The marching band's trip to the French Riviera," I responded, fingers rapidly flying over the keys on the laptop, though my eyes were still half trained on him.

"Cote d'Azure," he corrected.

"I've already worked that in," I frowned, not enjoying being corrected, especially since I'm minoring in French Studies and probably more of an expert on these things than he was. Especially if he had told me the truth – for once – and really had been born in the Brockport area. Just because his mother tongue was French did not necessarily mean he knew everything about the country. Just like English is my first language and I know shit-all about England (except for where its history overlapped with France). Of course, if he had lied about where he was born and he really was the son of a French aristocrat circa the eighteenth century, then he probably did know way more than me.

Maybe, I thought, I could trick him into revealing his age or at least a birthplace so I could spend disgusting amounts of time reseaching a Michel around his age who had either died or went missing. I could probably turn it into my thesis project. "How much do you know about the area?" I asked.

"Enough," he responded, lounging against the table beside the computer and brushing his knee against mine. He slouched down and looked bored. "I've been there."

"Really?" I asked, giving him my full attention. "I think it would be amazing to see. What's it like?"

"Like any other place," he responded with a shrug. "Obviously I'm distracting you. I'll just wait in your bedroom."

I felt like I should be indignant about his presumptuousness, but I couldn't do more than stare at him and blush slightly, my body tighten with need as he shot me a cocky grin and stood. My hand darted out before my brain had time to react and I grabbed his belt, hauling him back towards me. He shut the computer screen with a snap, almost catching my fingers, as he leaned forward to kiss me. He pushed my chair backwards and it scraped against the linoleum of the kitchen floor until I was far enough away from the table to stand. Instead, he pressed against my shoulder with one strong arm, effectively keeping me in place as he straddled my lap and sifted his fingers though my hair.

I groaned against his mouth, shockingly turned on by role reversal. My fingers tightened across his ass as I bit his lip, hard. He jerked, pressing himself into my lower stomach.

"Bedroom," he muttered, ignoring his own suggestion and weaving his fingers tightly into my hair and hauling back my head. His mouth was demanding against mine, and he didn't hesitate to use his teeth against my lips until the kiss tasted of blood and my mouth was swollen and sensitive.

"Table," I responded breathlessly. We very rarely made it into a bed. Sometimes it was because Michel was far too kinky and imaginative to go for something so completely staid, but mostly, I noticed, it was because once we got started we couldn't take our hands off each other for even the moment it would take to move rooms.

He had me bent backwards over the chair as far as I could go, his body still keeping me seated. My hands were grasping his ass, splayed against them so my fingers could dig into the hard muscle and draw him closer towards me. Michel's hand was beneath my shirt, cool fingers playing with my breast.

"Don't be in such a hurry," he reminded me, but contradicted his leisurely tone by dragging my shirt up over my head and lowering his mouth to my neck. He hit that spot right above the artery, the one his mouth had found so often during my orgasms that just a brush of his lips against it had me arching up towards him.

"Michel," I begged, panting. I could feel his lips curve into a masculine smile against my neck, and he chucked in appreciation. My hand moved from his deliciously curved posterior and cupped against his erection, stroking him through his jeans.

He surprised me again by getting off my lap at a leisurely pace and drawing me to my feet. My knees almost collapsed beneath me as I stood. I was so used to him grabbing me and throwing me down at that rapid, eye-blinking speed of his, that when casually lifted me onto the table at a rate I could follow, I couldn't help but pay attention.

"Enjoy it," he said in a seductive tone. "Feel what I do to you." His fingers were slowly unbuttoning my jeans and I blinked rapidly at him, finding it difficult to catch my breath as he drew my pants down my legs and spread my legs.

Then he moved, his mouth on me and tongue rough inside me, surprising me more than he should have after the slow progression moments earlier.

"Oh Christ," I gasped in shock, my fingers in his hair.

x.x.x

Kerry awoke to a light turning on and groaned, her body still slick from sweat and other fluids. She hadn't been asleep long, she realized groggily, feeling Luke's arm heavy around her waist and his warm hand possessively over her breast. She slid her legs together and sighed, closing her eyes and slowly moving her hand down to between her thighs.

"I may be a bastard," a low voice spoke from beside her head. Kerry's eyes flew open, and she almost jumped out of her skin to find Michel's blue eyes staring into hers. She could see him from the light in the hallway, and it occurred to her that he was probably the one who had woken her up. For a moment, she thought she was hallucinating, but then he continued to speak. "But at least you always got off when I fucked you."

Kerry glared at him. "You don't know what you're talking about," she hissed, glaring at him. She could tell he was laughing at her, though his gaze never changed from the slightly-amused mask he always wore.

"I could help you out with that, if you want," he offered with a raised eyebrow and a smirk.

Kerry blushed suddenly, yanking the sheets up to cover her naked body. She suddenly realized that Michel was crouched beside her bed making sexual innuendoes. Michel was seeing her at her most vulnerable, in bed with another man. "What are YOU doing here?" she asked hostilely.

"There's been another murder," he explained with no preamble about how sorry he was, or how betrayed he felt that she had moved on. No vows of everlasting love, either. She really wasn't dreaming. "You'll probably want to see it."

"You want me to go with you?" she questioned incredulously, casting a worried look over her shoulder at Luke. The last thing she needed was for him to wake up right now and find Michel crouched beside their bed. "I told you I never want to see you again."

Michel smiled at her, the same self-confident grin she had always hated. I know something you don't, he seemed to say. It made her want to slap him again. "Don't worry about quick draw here noticing you're gone," he said, nodding to Luke. "He won't be waking up for a while."

Kerry's eyes widened and then narrowed in venomous fury. "You used your vampire powers on my boyfriend?"

"Fiancé," he corrected, rocking back on his heels as though afraid she was going to lash out. "But then I'd be trying to forget about that too if my boyfriend left me all hot and bothered after sex."

"You're lucky you have such a thoughtful boyfriend," Kerry sniped.

Michel's lips quirked as he stood. "He's the best. Now come on," he said, gesturing towards the door. "I want to get there before the cops traipse all over the scene."

Kerry thought about it for a moment, she honestly did. A good portion of her wanted to do nothing more than play detective with him again, but she realized that it was impossible. She had already tried to move on with her life, and he being in it just complicated things. He was giving her more of a choice than just continuing the investigation, she knew, but she couldn't take him up on his offer. It was difficult enough to let go the first time, but she needed the clean break now, or she'd be forever mourning him.

She focused her eyes on him again, but he had already left. He always had been good at reading the expressions on her face. It was too late for him to see her next reaction, where for the smallest fraction of a second she was sure she had made a mistake, possibly the biggest one of her life.

Instead of chasing after him, she closed her eyes and went back to sleep, ignoring the slight wetness seeping out from beneath her lashes. If Kerry did anything well, it was bury Michel in the past where he belonged.

x.x.x

I was walking with my head down, hair hanging over one shoulder with white flakes of snow clinging to the brown waves. The fancy cobblestone walkway in the historical district was a beautiful attraction to tourists, but on a slippery, snowing evening it was a hazard to walk on even for people who weren't wearing three-inched, open toed heels. It was all I could not to fall. My dignity had dropped out around the point where I had been forced to hold on to a railing with both hands as I inched my way down a flight of stairs.

As I hobbled past the picturesque fountain situated in the center of the plaza, the tinkling of water caused me to pause and watch as the snow played off the illumination coming from within the fountain. It was like there were diamonds dancing above the water. The flurries created a startling fairytale image, the kind where lovers exchange romantic sentiments, or boyfriends knelt on one knee with a sparking ring. For a moment, I barely felt the cold numbing my toes, or worried that I had somehow misplaced my cab money and would have to walk home wearing a tiny dress and even tinier shoes.

I was transported to a place that wasn't real, where I stood next to this fountain and smiled up at the man of my dreams as he brushed a snowflake off my nose with a teasing smile. The snow would contrast wonderfully with his dark hair, and it wouldn't melt as it landed on him. His fingers would be wrapped around mine, despite the fact that we were no longer walking, and when he looked at me it would take my breath away.

"Kerry," he'd say, kissing my knuckles with so I'd notice the sparkle of mirth in his eyes as he glanced up at me through his thick, long eyelashes. "Is beauty worth catching your death of cold?"

At first, I'd assume he was talking about the fountain, but then I'd realize that his eyes were still staring at me. I'd smile, and my heartrate would give a small kick. I couldn't help the reaction, but I knew how much he enjoyed it. He'd let go of my hand, gently placing his fingers beneath my chin in order to lean in for a kiss.

That, I knew, was how it should go. I wasn't surprised that even in a fantasy of romance, he took a starring role. He'd always be the only one, I told myself. He'd always be my prince charming: the man of my dreams.

Chapter Text

Kerry awoke with a start the next morning with drool coating the pillow beneath her chin in a layer of saliva. She wiped at her mouth, feeling a sinking feeling in the pit of her stomach as she realized that Michel's visit hadn't been a horrible dream. There had been another death somewhere in town, and she had hesitated too long to be in on the scoop. She didn't know what it was, but when Michel was involved she found herself putting her problems with him in front of her own career. She wouldn't make sacrifices for him when they were together, so why was she willing to hurt her job just because they had gotten in a fight?

There was no safe way to answer that question.

The sun was shining in her bedroom window, almost mocking her with the pure light as it shined through the translucent curtains and enlightened the white goose-down comforter over the bed. She had seen the movie-set quality of her bedroom in the morning light before, but today it seemed off and fake to her critical eyes.

She felt hung over, a headache gathering just behind her eyelids and radiating down to her toes. She thought it might be from lack of sleep, but knew that wasn't the case. After Michel had left, she had stared blindly at the wall for an hour or so, and then dropped off into a comatose deep sleep, where she was barely aware of the phone ringing and Luke stumbling out of bed and into his police uniform, kissing her forehead before he left. This morning, as Kerry fingered his cold, empty side of the bed, she knew he had been called on-duty on his night off to deal with another body.

As she rolled out of bed and into the kitchen for some coffee, Kerry couldn't help but wonder what would have happened if he had gotten that call and she hadn't been beside him? Would he have been surprised to arrive on scene and find her already there? Angry and betrayed she hadn't woken him up? Or would he have understood her drive for the truth?

For some reason, Kerry didn't think he would have even recognised the latter. In their short relationship, she hadn't quite displayed her usual intensity for her job. It had been a while since a story drove her beyond the levels of comfort and into an investigation in which she risked everything: her job, her relationships, her freedom, and her life. In some odd way, she recognised the fact that Michel was the reason she was back to being herself.

Maybe she just needed closure.

She wasn't the type of girl who needed a man in her life in order to function normally.

Within the hour, Kerry found herself sitting at her desk at work. Without Dr. Roberts as her contact in the medical examiner's office, she had no inside information about the newest victim other than a name and the location he was found in. She wasn't sure how she was supposed to figure anything out when no one would supply her with pictures of the crime scene.

She also wasn't sure why exactly she was still working on the case. She could say it was because she was deeply embroiled in it now, and that she had to satisfy her own curiosity, but she had a feeling that really she wanted to prove that she could. Sure, she wanted to prove it to him, but there was someone far more important who needed to learn exactly what she was capable of: herself.

"I still can't believe you're engaged!" Nelle exclaimed, plopping her butt down on the corner of Kerry's desk. Kerry looked up from the papers spread across every available surface, jarred out of her work by Nelle's arrival.

"I thought we were taking a late lunch today because you had that wedding shoot," Kerry said in dismay, looking at all the work before her with a sinking feeling. She had gotten so wrapped up her research that she hadn't even written the articles her boss was expecting from her for the day.

Nelle gave Kerry a look of disbelief, flicking the mouse so that the computer screen popped back to life. "It's already two o'clock, see?" She shook her head, staring at Kerry in concern. "What's wrong? You usually don't become so involved with your work unless you're avoiding something. Trouble in paradise already?"

Kerry glared at her best friend, angered by the fact that Nelle didn't even seem to care that people were dying. "This has nothing to do with Luke. There's a serial killer out there in the streets of Brockport. Dr. Roberts is dead, and –" Kerry cut off, realizing that Nelle probably wouldn't understand why she was so deeply involved in the case, her relationship with Dr. R notwithstanding.

"And what?" Nelle demanded, giving Kerry a sharp look. "It's up to you to bring his murderer to justice? It's up to you to go behind the backs of the authorities and solve the mystery like Nancy Drew or something? Don't be stupid. I know what this is about. You're just scared that Luke isn't the one."

Kerry sighed with impatience, realizing this conversation wasn't about to go away. "There is nothing wrong between Luke and I."

"Being alone is a scary thing. Are you sure you really love him and don't just love the idea of having someone?"

"Of course I love him," Kerry responded with surety. The question made her really look at Nelle, curious as to why she was bringing all this up. Nelle thought Luke was a miracle. "What's this about?" Kerry asked. "You think Luke is the greatest thing since sliced bread."

"Forever is a long time to wear the wrong ring," Nelle said sagely, getting up from her position against the desk. "We'll do lunch tomorrow. I'll bring you back a sandwich."

"Thanks," Kerry said distractedly, already deep in thought at Nelle's words. There were many parts of conversation that she would dissect over the next few days, but right now 'being alone is a scary thing' kept circling through her brain, over and over again until she was sure there was something important about the words. Could it really be that simple, she wondered? Could the fact that each of the victims had been alone at the time of their death really be the connecting piece?

She was sure at some point over the last week she had realized all of them had been alone when then died, but she never really considered that it might be the reason they died.

Maybe Dr. Robert's death was less her fault than she realized. Or possibly, that made it more her fault for making sure he was never on his own.

She stayed in the office until late, debating whether she should jot Michel off an email of her findings. On paper, it seemed so insignificant to say that they were looking for a vampire deliberately targeting men between the ages of 40-60 who were alone. She thought it might be an exercise in redundancy, and worse still as though she was offering the olive branch to him when really she just wanted to reverse her decision to be left out of the loop. They were both adults. They could probably work together without too much mishap, right?

She didn't believe that either, but an email was a far cry from tracking him down and pinning him against a wall. Nelle's words kept circling through her head, and she knew that there was something about the phrase that bothered her, kept her from leaving behind all the documents she had spread out in front of her. Even the pictures of Dr. Robert's murder scene were on the table, the colors shocking and garish against the muted beige of the table.

The blood was obviously gone, but she wondered if a vampire could really drink that much of it and maintain a visible sanity. Her fingers itched to ask.

Kerry was still lost in thought, the email half composed on her laptop in front of her, when her cell phone rang. She jumped, looking at the call display before answering. She didn't recognise the number, but often Luke would call her from a payphone while on the go if he happened to be taking a break at Duncan Donuts or something. "Hello?" she asked, maximizing the window to her email account.

"Kerry, this is Dave. I think we've found something out – Lucy and I—could you come over to talk about it? I don't want to get too specific on the phone and we can't leave the house because of our son." He was obviously apologetic about this, though Kerry didn't think he needed to be. She had been in the same position when Ian was younger and she was supposed to be keeping an eye on him. It was difficult to have any kind of life when a child was involved.

"Of course!" Kerry told him, exiting the window for the email without saving it and shutting down her computer. "I can be there immediately."

She hung up and put on her coat, slightly surprised to find the time to be after eleven at night. She hadn't realized it was that late, but it would explain the need she felt for a gallon off coffee. She hadn't been sleeping well for the last couple of evenings, and she had been busier than ever. In truth, she was really thriving these days, and felt like her job had finally turned her way. With that thought on her mind – that the conference room she had taken over with her things finally looked like how she pictured her job would be – she left the office with a smile on her lips and a wave and goodnight to the on-shift security guard at the front desk.

There was no traffic on the streets as she drove to Ethan Bryne's old place, and as she focused on her driving she couldn't help but wonder if he was there, and if Dave had deliberately not mentioned that. She wouldn't be upset, she decided, but she also would not appreciate the subterfuge. A few weak glares would be in order.

She turned into the driveway, once again feeling the inadequacy of her rustmobile in the driveway of such a perfect house. She hoped the oil didn't decide tonight would be the night it would restart the chronic leaking she had been plagued with since buying the car second-hand. Well, even if it did, the very small, revenge-driven person inside her said he deserved it a little bit. She stepped out of her car, feeling the cool air hit against her leg as she stood, locking her car without thought as she made her way towards the front door. The house, as always, was far too beautiful in its own right to resist, and she felt calmed by the idea of being able to sit in it one last time, even if Michel wasn't there. Even though all the years she had missed him, she has also missed the house and she never stopped loving it even when she stopped loving him.

Before she knew it, Dave was ushering her into the house, explaining that the lil one was sound asleep upstairs, so could she please take off her heels on the welcome mat? Kerry then padded into the living room, the hardwood floor cold on her bare toes.

"Kerry," Lucy said welcoming. "Please sit down."

Kerry was pleased to see her apprehension was for nothing. Michel wasn't there, and she didn't think he was the type to hide behind closed doors and then pop out at her when she least expected it. He was far more forthwith about these things. If he was going to waylay her at any point tonight, he would have been sitting in the living room when she arrived with his mocking grin firmly on his face, and she would have either wanted to slap him or walk out. She used to have a third reaction to that smirk, which was to sit in his lap and kiss it away, but she didn't think he'd ever be able provoke her enough these days to do that.

But she was glad she wasn't being tested nonetheless.

Kerry sat in Michel's favourite seat without noticing the irony, curling her feet beneath her and also not noticing how rude that was considering he was not her host.

"Would you like some tea, coffee, pepsi?" Lucy asked as Dave sat beside her on the couch.

"No thanks," Kerry responded, mentally rubbing her hands together at the idea that this mystery might just about be solved. Her curiosity always won out. "You said you've found something."

"Yes," Dave responded. "But you might not like it."

Kerry raised an eyebrow.

"We think the killer is Michael."

Kerry snorted, her lips curling up in mirth until she looked at the serious expressions on their faces, Lucy's brow scrunched up in concern, and realized they were serious. Her expression froze. "No, you're wrong," she said with the absolute surety of someone who was one in love with him.

"Just hear us out," Lucy told her insistently, leaning forward. "I know you don't want to hear it, but we have good reason to suggest he could be a murderer. It took us a while to see through it too. We liked him too much to even question him."

It was on the tip of Kerry's mind to point out that Michel hadn't even been in town for the first death, and that he wasn't capable of murder to this degree, but she didn't believe that. She did believe, however, that he wasn't capable of it without a really good reason and/or purpose behind it. So she stayed quiet, just to see what they would say.

"I know you think he wasn't in town for the first few, but he's been around. He's been living in some town in southern Ontario for the last month and came to visit us a few times."

Kerry could feel her heart rate pick up. They weren't convincing her any differently, but she told herself she didn't know what else it could be. It certainly wasn't because he had been so close to her without her even knowing about it or because she couldn't help but wonder if he had been watching her from the shadows while she was completely oblivious. She didn't know if he could visit Brockport without giving into his own curiosity. She was sure she wouldn't be able to. "What reason would he have to kill those people," she asked, because she really believed he hadn't done it.

"To get your attention?" Dave asked. "Lucy and I were talking about it, and she thought it might have more to do with the fact that Michael will never get to be the age they are, that he'll be stuck as a nineteen-year old boy forever. It made him bitter, and finally broke him."

This time Kerry did laugh. "Would you two listen to yourselves? That's crazy. Michel likes who he is very much, what age he is. He once told me that it has so many benefits that he would never want to age beyond where he is. And there are far more fun ways for him to get my attention and keep it. He could have killed my fiancée, for one."

"You're getting married?" Lucy asked, her eyebrows winging up.

Kerry nodded sharply, wondering how the topic changed so quickly. "Yes. Michel is not happy, but I don't believe he'd kill over it, just like I don't believe he's gone crazy. I'd just as soon believe one of you did it."

"I wish you hadn't said that," Lucy said mildly, as something heavy slammed into the back of Kerry's head and she felt like her brain was exploding for a moment before everything went black.

He always had more self-confidence than anyone I knew. He could be anyone he wanted to be, changing between personalities more fluidly than a professional model dons new clothing, and they were all distinguishable from one another in some respect. He never broke character, not even around me. I never assumed he could be himself around me, but I thought that maybe he allowed me to see facets that other people didn't get a chance to see. Maybe he allowed whatever current cloak he was wearing to relax a bit, or maybe he just layered it on top of the one labelled "Ethan Bryne" and "Michel—Kerry's".

Sometimes, I didn't think he actually had a true self. His true self was a chameleon, constantly changing, and that's the way he likes it. Other times, he would look at me a certain way and I was sure I was seeing the real Michel.

Tonight, he interrupted a birthday party I was at with a date, walking into the restaurant in such a way that drew gazes without anyone really looking at him. His hair was slicked into a fauxhawk and his eyes were dramatically lined in black. There was a tattoo peaking out of his collar which looked real, but I knew was fake. What really drew my eye – and likely the eye of every other woman in the restaurant – were his tight leather pants that framed all the right areas and highlighted the muscles in his legs. My eyes were already following his crotch when they happened to look up to his face and I was jolted by the realization that not only did I recognise him, but I had already seen him naked. And he was heading this way. A blush rapidly spread up my cheeks as he smirked knowingly at me, moving in a quick, fluid motion until my head was bent back and he was kissing me.

I forgot about everything in that kiss, awareness of him pumping through my sizzling blood, making me dizzy. "Hi," he whispered, mouth hovering a breath away from mine. "I'm Daniel, and you're going to take me home tonight."

I blinked at him, my brain slow to compute after that kiss.

"Oh my God," one of my friends said. "That's the hottest thing ever."

My hand was in his and he was dragging me from the seat and towards the door before I could really recover my wits. I could hear my friends start to giggle and gossip behind me, jeering on the guy I was dating for being stood up in such a blatant manner. Michel's hand was cool within mine, and I was suddenly reminded that my jacket was still on the back of my chair. The cold air from outside hit my bare arms as we approached the door, and he swung his jacket off his shoulders and around mine in one smooth movement. Someone, presumably from my table, cheered and whistled as he opened the door and gestured for me to exit before he did.

"Michel," I whispered, tightening my finger in his. "I was on a date. Out with my friends. Isn't that the kind of situation you try to avoid?"

He twirled me around in something reminiscent of a dance move, our fingers still intertwined as he kissed me again, thoroughly, beneath the sparkling holiday lights decorating the front of the restaurant. Snow was lightly falling over his dark hair, and a flake caught in the webbing of my eyelash before melting, making his visage burn and waver for a moment. My fingers curled around his neck, one hand splayed across his slowly-beating heart, and I thought of how perfect it all was.

That night would be the last time I saw him for four years.

But he had given me every reason to believe he would be responsive when I asked him to allow me to stay.

Kerry awoke to the cold. For a moment she was comforted by the idea that maybe Michel had snuck into her room again and curled around her. Then, she noticed that her arms were awkwardly stuck above her head, fingers gone numb. She panicked, feeling confused and frightened at the memory of the look on Lucy's face when Dave knocked her out. She now knew they were definitely the killers, not Michel. At the same time she was sure she wouldn't have figured it out if they hadn't shown their hand. They had a small, human child for God's sake, and Dave was only recently turned.

She was comforted by the realization that Michel had probably overlooked them as well, but at the same time it made her realize he wouldn't magically show up to save her ass this time. The thought made her heart leap up to her throat. Kerry tested the bonds her wrists were bound in, realizing she probably wouldn't be able to save herself either. She could feel her hope drown in tears with every tug.

Kerry struggled in vain until blood was trickling down her arms and her wrists were raw and painful. Even then she kept tugging, hoping for some give.

She was going to die, and the only good thing that would come from it was that she would break the pattern. If Dave was smart, he wouldn't kill her in a way that seemed like the other vampire deaths, and she was sure if that happened the only one who would realize the truth would be Michel. If he cared enough to even pay attention to her death. It was possible that her body would wash up in the river and he would know she died figuring out the mystery, but he wouldn't care. It was also possible he was so far away from here that he wouldn't even hear about the fact she was dead. Dave just wouldn't tell him, end of story.

Kerry always hated the idea of dying for no reason.

Don't worry, she told herself, Luke will notice you've disappeared. But that wasn't true either. Their schedules were so different that she hadn't even seen him yet today. He might not think anything of it for more than 24 hours. If Dave really was a murderous genius, he would have her dead and gone by that point.

With this train of thought she was surprised to find the door to her chamber open and Lucy step in, flicking the light on. It blared in Kerry's eyes and she squinted against it as a cart was wheeled in and placed beside the bed she was in. "Why are you doing this?" she asked, not foolish enough to think Lucy was going to let her go.

"Because," Lucy responded, fiddling with something on the cart that Kerry couldn't see. "I really love this house."

She was still in Ethan's house, Kerry realized disquietly. She was going to die in the place she always wanted to live.

"He left it to you, you know," Lucy continued. "In his living will. If he disappears from the country for more than 6 months without any contact with his lawyer, the house becomes yours. If you get married first, it becomes a wedding gift."

Kerry couldn't speak beyond the buzz in her head. He had given her the house, despite the fact it was one of the only things he owned that he wanted to keep for himself. Did that mean he...? She couldn't even voice the word in her head, hadn't let herself ever think of it because she knew it was impossible for him to really have feelings for her. It confused her that he would make sacrifices for her, especially considering he was willing to give her the house to live in once she married Luke. It was... unimaginable. "He didn't," she denied.

"He did. Can you imagine our surprise when we found out the house wasn't coming to us? He changed Dave you know, years ago when he was still living here. But you messed that up too, and he gives you our house on top of it?" Lucy's voice remained strangely calm through the entire speech. Kerry could finally see what was in her hand, and it put shivers of fear up her spine.

"It's not my fault. Killing me won't do anything," she pointed out. "Do you really think he'll give you the house if I'm out of the way?"

Lucy finally smiled, cold and deadly. "You're the bait, dear. If he'll give you a house, he'll show up if we send his phone a picture of you tied to the headboard of his bed, dying."

Kerry shook her head in denial, but Lucy was still standing over her with the needle. "Shhhh," she told her, putting a hand over Kerry's mouth. "Shhh." Kerry barely flinched as the needle went into the artery in her neck, too frightened to move, fearing that one wrong move would rip open her jugular. With the rapid beat of her heart, her blood quickly moved down the tubing in a rapid red cascade. She tried to convince herself to calm down, that she would only die quicker if she kept panicking, but her blood kept flowing at an alarming rate, pooling in a bag still on the cart.

"He won't take the bait," she denied, even as Lucy raised her phone and snapped a picture. "He doesn't care that much, not enough to risk his own life."

"I disagree my dear. Once he sees that we'll kill you like we killed the others, he'll come to stop us. He might convince himself it's for the good of vampire kind and not because of you, but I know different. That's why I have Dave waiting downstairs, ready to shoot your precious Michel the moment he walks in the house. And no warning shots to the knees. Haha," she laughed. "He won't even see it coming."

"You're mad," Kerry snarled, but bit her tongue. If they wanted to think they could fool Michel with such an easy ploy, they were seriously underestimating him. A woman with a child (and possibly a serious mental problem) and a newly turned vamp against Michel? It was almost laughable. Her face didn't show the fact Lucy's words had the opposite effect on her, calming her rather than making her more frightened or worried about the outcome of all this, but the flow of her blood slowed as her heart rate decreased. She still wasn't convinced that Michel would come to save her, especially considering the last time she had seen him she had pretty much pushed him out of her life, but if he did she wasn't worried for him.

He'd mop the floor with the blood of these fools.

"Once the two of you are gone," Lucy continued, "we'll be free to live here forever. The house will be ours."

"That doesn't make sense," Kerry mused sluggishly. She was starting to feel the effects of blood loss. One bag had already filled up and Lucy had exchanged it for another. She stared at them lined up on the cart, marvelling how much blood the human body could hold. "Is this how you did it? Is this how they all lost so much blood but without the crazy vampire insane with insat... insash... insatiable bloodlust?"

Lucy snorted. "Of course. Didn't you figure it out when you first saw the needle, or are you not as clever as he said? You know, I've heard him say a lot of things about a lot of women, that they're sexy, or cute, or dumb as a doornail but good in bed, but he has never just shook his head and said one was clever before. Clever! He's never even given me a compliment like that before!"

Despite the fuzzyness of her mind, Kerry recognised the tone of someone in love with Michel but who also hated him. She had heard it in her own voice many times over the last year. "Oh," Kerry said meaningfully, giving Lucy a sympathetic look. Kerry guessed that when she was sixteen that Lucy must have been around twenty-two, and since she was now older than that and Michel still pulled at her heartstrings, she could see it would be easy to fall for him at that age.

"What? What?" Lucy shrieked. "What could you possibly have inferred from that?"

"You loved him. I understand how easily it happens, and Ethan Bryne's personality was meant to be one of his more charming ones. It wasn't my fault he disappeared all those years ago, you know. Even if I wasn't involved, he still would have left when Marsala killed Regina."

"You don't know anything," Lucy sneered, changing the bag to a third one. Kerry's vision was starting turn black with golden flecks of light around the edges. She was woozy and oh so dizzy that it took her multiple blinks to clear her vision enough to stare at the other woman.

She thought it was possible Lucy was right. If Kerry knew anything at all, she wouldn't be antagonizing the woman slowly bleeding her dry. "I know what I would do for him," she reminded Lucy calmly. "I've killed for him before, and isn't that what you're doing. This isn't about the house at all, is it?"

"Shut up!"

"It's about losing him," Kerry continued, her mouth dry and the words slurred, but she couldn't stop now. "You didn't think any woman had a chance with him. It was about pride. You don't mind that you didn't hold his attention, but you do care that someone else, someone you consider to have taken him away from you, you care that he seems to hold her in greater esteem than he did you and still does, even eight years later. I can't imagine what that must have felt like, recognising my name on his will when he asked Dave to be the executive of it – he did, didn't he? – and knowing I was the one who took him away from you, both because you blamed me for the Marsala thing and because eight years later and he still wasn't willing to give you the house he considered to be his favourite thing." She was rambling now, trying to stay lucid even as Lucy angrily changed another bag to make four. Her heart hurt with the idea that this would be half of her entire blood capacity.

She didn't know why Lucy was so carefully saving the blood, but thought it might have something to do with Michel that she couldn't figure out right now.

"He loves me," Kerry finally slurred, though she didn't believe it for one moment. "He doesn't want to, but he does. I conflict him. He was always sure about his lack of feelings for you, and he'll kill you without hesitation. You've put them all in danger, and he'll kill you for it."

"He doesn't love anyone and he won't kill me because Dave will kill him!"

Kerry started to laugh, starting with a low chuckle and then burbling with hysterics.

"Shut up." Lucy told her. When Kerry didn't stop, Lucy grabbed a scalpel from the table and showed it to her. "I really don't need you alive."

Kerry eyed her, about to mock and claim that Lucy wouldn't do it, but it was too late. Lucy's arm was already moving towards her neck, quickly slicing across the flesh with a quick stroke. Kerry felt a quick flash of pain and she gasped, some vague, CSI-watching part of her mind realizing that if she could breathe and wasn't choking on her own blood Lucy hadn't hit the trachea. "Bitch," she hissed, feeling the wetness of her blood pool against her collar in warm spurts. It wasn't moving as quickly as she thought it would, and some part of her which could still see the world beyond the blackness wondered if she had already lost too much blood for her veins to really spurt.

"Lucy," Michel said from the doorway. He had arrived so silent, just appearing as far as Kerry could tell. His eyes moved from the woman standing beside to bed to Kerry, his expression becoming closed as he took in her blood and the binds still holding her hands in place. He didn't say anything, merely raised a gun and shot Lucy through the head.

Kerry was convinced Michel was a hallucination until Lucy's blood sprayed over her face, surprisingly warm. Kerry slowly looked over to where Lucy had been standing, her brain unable to really comprehend what happened. The gun thudded as it hit the wall, and she blinked, incredibly slowly, seeing Lucy's body crumpled against the floor and blood flowing into a dark pool beneath her.

"Jesus. Jesus." Michel was saying, straddling her on the bed. Her attention moved towards him, so sluggishly she had a flash of fear and then it was gone, forgotten about. His fingers were at her neck though she couldn't feel anything but coldness, and she wondered if that was bad. "Look at me Kerry," Michel was saying. "You look at me."

"Love you," she whispered, thinking he should know. "Only."

"I know," he said impatiently. "Now you listen to me. I'm holding the artery in place and I'm going to call 911. Listen to my voice and stay awake. Do you think you can do that?"

"Yes," she said slowly, but was already drifting.

His hand patted her cheek, trying to keep her awake. "Open your eyes," he told her angrily.

She did, her head feeling surprisingly alert even if her brain didn't seem to be working. He used his left hand to pull his phone out of his pocket, and she noticed it was coated with red. Her dim wits took longer than they should have to comprehend it was her blood. "I need an ambulance," Michel was saying into the phone, rhyming off the street address. "Bring B+ blood. She's lost a lot of it. The artery in her neck has been sliced open. Yes, I'm pinching it closed with my hand. Yes, I can identify her – Kerry, look at me goddamnit – her name is Kerry Nowicki, and I'm not answering any more questions." He hung up the phone, his fingers brushing against her cheek. "You'll be ok. Can you hear me?"

Kerry tried to say yes, but her mouth opened without any sounds emerging. She could see it in his eyes that he knew he was lying to her. She thought it was a profound realization for the moment.

"You're too stubborn to die, aren't you?" he asked.

She was physically shaking, she knew from the way he was pressing her shoulder in place now in order to not dislodge the fingers of his right hand, though she couldn't really feel it. The world was black again, and she couldn't see him. "Don't you die on me!" he told her. "Don't die."

Some part of her deep in her soul broke at his words, and a tear trailed down her cheek, over the bloody handprint he left.

"Kerry!"

Though she was still tenuously clinging to life, she didn't hear when the police raided the room, yelling at Michel to put his hands up. She missed how he yelled back he was FBI, telling them that if he moved his hands that she would lose whatever blood was left in her body and die, but if they really needed to positively identify him right now, his ID was in his jacket pocket. She also missed how he snarled at Luke when he jarred Michel's arm searching for a wallet, calling him an idiot and a fool who didn't deserve someone like her. She later heard about it from Kevin. He also told her how Michel had deliberately antagonized Luke by brushing a tender kiss across her lips when the ambulance pulled up, whispering she just had to hold on a little longer. That was something she hadn't missed.

x.x.x

When Kerry woke up thirty-six hours later, her father was sitting by her side with Ian. She blinked at them, shocked to still be alive. She just couldn't fathom why she hadn't died that night. It seemed impossible. She could hear the machines beeping in the background and they made her head hurt. Her entire body was sore, except, ironically, her neck. It felt stretched tight, and oddly tingly.

"Kerry's awake!" Ian exclaimed, seeing her eyelids flutter.

"I'm alive?" she croaked. "He did it?" She hadn't thought he could pull it off, assumed he would see how hopeless it all was and get away before he was recognised, arrested, left out in the sun to be executed. Tears welled up in her eyes, and her father, seeing them, assumed she was in pain and pressed the button to give her morphine.

The next time she woke up Luke was beside her, giving her a puppy-dog glance. "That man," he demanded the moment Kerry opened her eyes. "Who was he?"

Kerry ignored him, pretending to frown in confusion. "Man?"

"The one who "saved" your life. He wouldn't let me touch you, though I tried explaining I was your fiancée and a police officer. He called me an idiot."

Kerry closed her eyes again, head hurting, and feigned sleep this time. It was difficult when the corners of her mouth wanted to quirk up in amusement.

Her father and Ian visited whenever possible, but she was surprised when the next day Kevin stopped by her room with a bouquet of hideous flowers. "Luke's spitting mad," he explained, putting the vase on the table. "I thought you might like something to pretty up your room, but it looks like you have other friends."

Kerry smiled at him, genuinely meaning it. "My co-workers sent me flowers to celebrate breaking the story. Apparently I wrote in a draft before I was even out of surgery." She had a sneaky suspicion who really wrote her expose too. "But none of them mean as much as flowers from a friend, so thank you."

Kevin looked uncomfortable, used to the only words the two of them exchanged to be witty banter. "So I didn't know you knew FBI! You get around."

"Considering he's an exboyfriend," she found herself saying beyond all reason, "then you mean that literally."

"That explains it," Kevin said with a nod as he settled himself into the visitor's seat. He was the first who came to see her who treated her normally, not like an invalid. Luke, of course, hadn't treated her like a dead woman walking either, but his reaction was far more disconcerting, as though his jealousy was more important than her life. "FBI guy kissed you when the ambulance pulled up, and demanded you hold on just a little while longer. I figured it was to piss Luke off, and boy did it."

"He meant it," she said quietly, remembering that Michel's exact words had been 'you're almost there... just hold on a little bit longer.' She could also remember the feeling of his fingers squeezing her hand in the ambulance, and realized he hadn't let go of her the entire time. "Luke has no reason to be angry."

"You sure? It didn't look like 'no reason' to me."

Kerry glared at him. "I mean he has no reason to be angry with me. I had been kidnapped and was unconscious. I don't deserve my boyfriend to giving me the cold shoulder when I probably wouldn't be alive right now if..." She broke off. "I'm sorry, this conversation is too heavy for you. What's the latest gossip?"

"You!" Kevin exclaimed, looking surprised she even had to ask.

She already knew that when she got out of the hospital, she'd be adding fuel to the spreading fire regarding Luke and herself, and how she outsmarted him and almost died for it. When she got out, she wasn't sure there could be a Luke and Kerry anymore, for far more deeper reasons.

How could his affections mean anything to her after this?

It was another two days before she woke up to find Michel sitting beside her. They merely looked at each other for a long time, surveying the field. Her neck felt itchy in a way that had nothing to do with the physical healing wound and everything to do with the reminder of who he was and what he had done for her. She wanted to throw herself in his arms, and she wanted more than anything for him to stay in that seat forever.

"How's your neck?" he finally asked.

She should have told him that the doctors thought she should be fine, that she might need plastic surgery to cover the scar because his fingers, as slim as they are, had still opened the wound enough to damage her skin. Joked about how her vanity wasn't so great that she wasn't grateful he saved her life. She also could have mentioned that they praised him for not trying to put her own blood back in her body, that the bags had been recycled from the last victim and she probably would have died slowly and painfully with the mixture of blood types. She should have told him she knew he hadn't just made the decision not to, but had stopped other, well-meaning, people from doing it either.

"I still love you," she said instead.

"I know," he responded with certainty. "I'm leaving Brockport, and I won't be back. You won't see me again."

"I understand." She nodded to show that she meant the words, and she did. He had shown too much emotion towards her by continuously re-entering her life, and he knew it. His reaction to her attempted murder was the last straw. He couldn't stay and he couldn't come back.

He wasn't looking at her anymore, but his fingers found hers and he squeezed her hand tightly. "Come with me," he finally asked.

Yes! Her brain screamed as she stared at him in shock. Say yes. Everything she had been thinking and planning over the past two days didn't mean anything. Wasn't this what she always wanted? "No," she responded slowly. "I can't yet."

His expression didn't go closed like she expected it to, and she wondered if he had known she was going to decline his offer. Instead, he smiled at her and it looked so real it made her stressed heart hurt. "It really was an honour to meet you," he told her. "You renewed my perspective on humanity. Goodbye, Kerry." He stood, bending to give her a quick peck on her cheek and left. The moment he was out the door she started to sob.

"Michel!" she called out. "I didn't mean it. Please come back."

Despite his excellent hearing, he didn't listen.

A week later she was released from the hospital. She kept to the plan she had developed in those first days, when she had seen Luke in the visitor's chair and realized she could never be happy with him, when Kevin had told her the story of her rescue, which she knew deserved a different slant than the one he gave it, and when she realized that she was wasting her life in Brockport. She returned the ring that night when Luke was at work, packing her things and moving into Nelle's apartment. Less than a month later, she was packed and moving out of town, her reputation as a serious reporter cemented with the story which spread across country about how she solved the case ahead of the police and almost became the next victim because of it.

She gave herself a new life, but all her accomplishments were empty.

x.x.x.x.x

Chapter Text

"No," Kerry snarled into the phone. "I do not believe the statement you gave to the cops. I know you better than that Danno, and I know you'd rather snitch for a price. So what's it going to take?" She listened to the little weasel on the other end name a number. "I can swing $50 for this kind of information, and you know it. Come on, it'll be the easiest money you'll ever make. I just need an address and your name will never even come up."

One of the interns approached her desk, nervously chewing on her lip. Kerry raised a hand asking her to wait.

"Yeah Danno, you better hope this information is good or you'll damage our working relationship." She chuckled to herself as she hung up, jotting the address down on a piece of paper and turned towards the intern. "Rule number 35: Sources are all whiners. What can I do for you?"

"I found him!" the intern – Kerry thought her name was Alice – blurted out. She took out her iPhone and pressed the screen, showing Kerry the display. "Is that him?"

Kerry didn't bother wasting time pretending to be confused by the disjointed conversation. The moment her eyes rested on the thumbnail of the image she knew who Alice was talking about, even though there were several "him"s she was trying to locate. Only one mattered. "Yes," Kerry said slowly, grabbing the phone out of Alice's hand and looking at Michel as he talked to some girl in a bar. "Where did you get this?"

"I went home for my birthday and he was just there," Alice said excitedly. "And oh Kerry he looked exactly like that picture you keep in your priority folder. I mean, I accidentally clicked into it when you had me looking up addresses for you, and we all know the story about how you've been trying to find this guy since you moved here last year and I just assumed that this was him, and I..."

"Rule number 1: Never apologize for doing what comes naturally. If you feel more guilt than satisfaction for finding out information, you're in the wrong profession. Where?"

"Where what?" The intern asked, juggling taking her phone back and processing Kerry's veiled insult to really catch on to the question.

"Where's your home," Kerry said impatiently.

"Oh! Des Moines!"

"Thank you," Kerry told the intern, turning back to her computer and dismissing her at the same time. She waited until the girl was gone before she picked her phone up again. "Yes," she said into the receiver when someone on the other end picked up. "I'd like to book a ticket to Des Moines International, please. When? As soon as possible. Are there any flights going there today?" She scribbled numbers down on a new piece of paper, the address she had wheedled out of her snitch forgotten. "Yes, for Kerry Nowicki."

She hung up the phone, staring at the numbers scrawled almost illegibly across the page. After more than a year of searching, she finally had a break on Michel's location and it wasn't due to any legwork on her part. She'd been trying so hard, too. She didn't know whether to feel relief that she was almost there or a sense of failure at the fact it hadn't been her to ultimately find him.

Kerry jarred herself out of the thought, realizing that if she didn't make a few more phone calls, she wouldn't be making her flight later that afternoon. She didn't think she could wait another day, especially now that she was so close.

x.x.x.x

"Stay," he said to me, and the word was so quiet that I paused just to hear him. His fingers around my wrist were more aggressive, tugging me towards him. I felt myself move, my body taking the opposite action than my brain told it to.

"I shouldn't," I said honestly, but I was. My legs parted naturally as my knees brushed against his, and he pulled me onto the bench on top of him. His fingers slid up the back of my legs, moving my skirt up my thighs. "It's too cold for this," I protested again.

"Say no."

I didn't say anything. His hand was under my skirt now, cupping my ass as he pulled me closer, my legs spreading wider and sprawling against the cool wood of the bench. His body was warmer, and somehow all the hard angles and sinewy muscles of it were a welcoming feeling. My hand was on his chest, one hand above his heart and the other resting on his shoulder for balance.

His free hand was sifting through my hair, playing with one of the more stubborn strands that managed to curl into the shape of my ear no matter how many times I straightened it. He cupped the side of my head before leaning in for a kiss, the first moment just a brush of lips against mine.

"Say no and I'll stop," he promised.

I didn't, and he didn't. His next kiss was stronger than the first, harder. His mouth was urgent against mine, coaxing my lips open as he forced me to lean backwards so that I had to cling to his shoulders to keep from falling. His teeth nipped my bottom lip, drawing it into his mouth. My breathing was sharp through my nose and his was barely even as he groped to rip the side of my underwear. They came off easily.

"Ooh please," I breathed as he broke the kiss, his mouth on my neck as his surprisingly rough fingers pressed against my clit. I was ready. I was more than ready – I had spent the last 3 years in a state of yearning for him.

He didn't seem to have much patience for foreplay tonight.

"Ohh. Ohh yes." I don't know if I had ever felt anything like I felt when he entered me, not even all the other times with him before it. I don't know what made it so much more. I didn't think waiting and wanted was enough for that.

The angle wasn't good, but he was thrusting just as desperately into me as I was moving against him. I was humming in the back of my throat, but I barely realized it as his mouth sought out mine, the kiss wet and sloppy with open mouths before he trailed his mouth down my chin to the pulse point of my neck. He hovered there, indecisively, for a moment before his fingers were in my hair again and he was kissing me, tongue pressing against mine.

We only lasted a few minutes. It had been so long since I felt him that his every move sent pleasure throughout each nerve until tears were streaming down my face at the sheer sensation of it. He wasn't kissing me anymore, but his face was so close to mine that I couldn't focus on him.

I was shaking before I orgasmed, and he held me against him, his head resting on my shoulder, breathing hard. I could feel him coming with me, inside me, but we were both silent.

There was so much I wanted to say that I couldn't say anything.

When it was over, he kissed the side of my neck very softly, so like he had the first moment I realized he was really a vampire that the image of him, face unforgiving, flashed in front of my eyes. Then I thought of every subsequent look and touch he had given me since.

Are you as addicted to me as I am to you? I wanted to ask, but I was afraid of the answer.

I guess that answered his question about what happened after midnight in downtown Brockport. There was no way I could have known at the time that while we were having this reunion born out of mutual desperation, Doctor Roberts was being murdered a few blocks away, but that didn't make me feel any less of a sense of guilt.

X.x.x.x

The flight from Chicago to Des Moines technically wasn't that long, but she spent the entire hour and change in a state of apprehension, not knowing what to expect when she arrived. She was terrified that he would take one look at her and turn away, or worse, say something hateful. She was even more terrified that she wouldn't be able to find him at all, that the picture wasn't of him, or he had only been in the city overnight, or he knew she was coming and was avoiding her. Kerry kept telling herself that she just wanted to see him again, and that it didn't matter what happened after that, but it wasn't the truth.

She wanted so much more than that. She wanted a happy ending.

The hotel she booked for three nights was centrally located in the city. She had picked it just for that reason, knowing she was going to have to go to a lot of bars and popular hangouts in order to find him, or at least a trace of him. She had a suitcase full of clubwear, and a head full of possible lies for unearthing him, including that she was pregnant with his child and he owed her money. She didn't think any of them would get her through the metaphorical door if anyone was loyal enough to protect him. She also had a wallet full of bribe money and the desperation to use it.

She was willing to use all her savings to find him. She'd been living off Kraft Dinner for a year in a drafty apartment just for that reason, so she would have the extra thousands to waste on her desperate search.

Why had she ever let him leave? Was there nobility in that kind of stupidity? She didn't think there was.

When the plane touched down, it was already night, and she walked through the airport with her small carry-on bag with her eyes wide and desperately open. Despite the fact she was really good at spotting what she was looking for in a crowd, and pretty much had to be for her profession, she still worried he would be within touching distance and she would miss him. Years ago, her body had been so aware of him that she knew when he was behind her, but she didn't know if that still worked, if that connection was still there. She had been far too busy denying everything her brain was screaming about how she felt about him last year to really pay attention.

Kerry didn't even relax on the way to the hotel, her eyes constantly searching the streets for his dark hair. In the picture Alice had shown her, he was dressed in his casual-preppy uniform he often wore to blend in with college students, and she was quickly making a mental note to check the campus bars and dorms if she needed to. Some girl somewhere probably recognised him, but the question would be whether she admitted it or not. Kerry wasn't in the mood to meet the current Kerry Nowicki, if he ever got around to replacing her in his affections, but she was also aware that most of the girls he got with wouldn't care one way or another where or who he was.

It was just the way he liked them.

The room was a decent size just for her, and it was warm, which was a step up from her apartment back home in Chicago. She didn't take the opportunity to spend much time in it, immediately taking a shower to wash off the plane scent. She applied eyeliner and shimmer, wriggling into a dress which was borderline indecent and practically the only thing she owned which was still in style and could constitute as club-wear. Any new clothing she bought these days was for work, but mostly she was just too cheap to spend money frivolously when she was trying to save for... well, this.

How did she tell him that she hated the woman she had become? The one who was only alive when he was there, and who allowed herself to fall into a relationship and a life that was only mediocre at best. How did she tell him that she hated the kind of woman who could cheat on her boyfriend like she had with Luke, and then turn around and become his fiancée in order to hurt the man she really loved? That wasn't Kerry Nowicki. That was some woman she could barely recognise when it was all over, and it made her uncomfortable to realize that that person would always be a part of her.

But now, she was able to dream again of a future with the two of them in it, together. Parts of it were almost unimaginable, as she couldn't even begin to guess what his life was really like, but how could she not earn to find out.

She didn't know where to go on from here. She had hit rock bottom and had crawled out herself, only to realize that her entire view of the world needed to be reassessed. Who was SHE to turn down anything Michel offered? As a human, she wasn't better or superior in any way, she was just human.

A desperate human at that. One who didn't find what she was looking for that first lonely night in a strange city, a picture her own solace.

x.x.x.

Night two didn't start off any better. Kerry had always known a good part of her work as a reporter, or really any job when locating information or people was great amounts of leg work, uncomfortable questions, and relying on the memories and honesty of other people. Research and questions she was good at, it was the part about relying on other people that she didn't like.

She had received two leads by the second night, neither had panned out. Some people thought he looked familiar, some of them just smirked at her and shrugged. One ma offered to show her "a better time than this child" and, best of all, had been told twice to stay away from him. That told her that he was still in the city.

Despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary.

"Have you seen him?" she asked the bartender, watching his face instead of looking at the picture. When his eyes flickered in recognition but mouth lied, she planted herself on the stool in the bar and looked him in the eye. She was prepared to lie through her teeth to find Michel, but instead she stayed with the truth. "If you see him tell him Kerry's looking for him. I'm one of the few people he'd actually be interested in talking to, so remember to mention me. Kerry."

The bartender looked at her sceptically.

"Look," she told him, slipping over a hundred. It was the second night, and she was getting desperate. "If he gets the message, I'll triple it."

He finally looked interested. "What was your name again?"

"Kerry," she repeated, enunciating carefully.

"Well, Kerry," he licked his lips and pocketed the money. "I don't know when Kurt'll be in here next, but he plays over at the Matchbox three times a week."

"Is tonight one of those nights?" Kerry asked.

The bartender shrugged.

"Fine," Kerry said, pulling out another two hundred dollars and slapping it on the bartop. "But if I don't find him I'll be back and I'll be a lot less pleasant."

Kerry wasn't considered a crack reporter for nothing. It took her less than five minutes to find the Matchbox, but more than an hour standing in line before she finally got in. Leave it to Michel to frequent a venue that was selective in who they let in, and with a capacity limit. The only reason she even managed to get through the bouncer and velvet rope was the slutty little dress she had wriggled into and the layers of shadow and shimmer coating her eyelids.

Despite the dim lighting, she spotted him immediately, standing center stage and crooning into a microphone. Her stomach did an odd little kick at the sight of him, one she hadn't felt since the Brockport murders, and even then she had been denying that she felt anything. She stopped in the doorway staring at him, watching as he picked up the electric guitar hanging by his side and started playing it. When the bartender had said he was playing here, she had pictured something to do the piano or maybe a keyboard. This was unexpected, and it was hot.

But it would also make him very difficult to talk to if he was now a local rockstar of some kind, with roadies and adoring fans trying to latch on to him. Someone jostled into her from behind, and she was forced forward, realizing that she would never get close to him unless he wanted her to. She felt like she could reach and out and touch him, but he was so far away too. Just, distant.

Out of her reach.

Her heart was yammering so hard it was a wonder he was able to keep the beat of the song over it.

She sat at the bar and watched him, trying to figure out a way to approach him to talk to him alone. She thought that everything would be solved if he would just look and see her, but his eyes didn't leave some girl in the first row, and Kerry felt her stomach churn over at the thought that he had someone else. She must have been frowning hard at him, because the woman beside her sighed and said "It's his gimmick."

"Excuse me?" Kerry asked politely.

"Kurt's. He picks a girl in the front and sings only to her, and then he buys her a drink and maybe takes her home if that goes well. The idea is that you just have to get close enough to get his attention. See?"

Kerry watched the people crowded around the stage, seeing how they all vied for attention and crushed forward, but it didn't seem any different from any other venue she had ever been to, even if Michel and his band were only playing covers, and the drummer wasn't that great. She could see that they had all been trying to get close to him, but she felt jealous at the idea he was encouraging it. Jealous, but also a little bit proud to have been the one he turned to in the past. She knew that if she stood in front of him right now, his eyes would stray away from the little girl he was watching and towards her, just like she was confident she could keep his attention.

She just wasn't sure it would be good attention.

Her mind ran the gamut of possible ways she could make him aware of her, from returning the next night he played and getting a place up front to waylaying him in the parking lot, but when it came right down to it, none of them were really good ideas. She wanted him to see her, and she wanted to run away, scared of what he would say when he finally noticed she was there. She knew he would probably say something hurtful, possibly that he only made offers once. She'd have to explain to him that she wasn't together with Luke anymore. That she had never intended to marry him at all. She had to tell him that she needed him in her life more than she needed anything else, but she also needed to know that she could make her life work without him. He had to know she didn't reject him, that she just needed... she couldn't really define it. Her entire life from the age of sixteen onwards had been defined by either loving him or hating him, and she just needed to have a life without him.

Unfortunately, even when she tried, he was still so ingrained in her psyche, so much a part of her life even when he was gone, that she wasn't living without him at all.

How did she explain all that in the three sentences he would probably allow her?

He was going to hate her.

He was going to ignore her.

He would yell she was a selfish bitch.

He'd walk out again.

He wouldn't do anything.

And her heart would shatter.

"Michel," she said lowly, her hand tightening painfully around the cosmopolitan she had ordered. The alcohol wasn't helping relax her like she hoped.

He looked up, halting his singing. The guitar crashed to a halt as he dropped it, eyes meeting hers with a roar that was far more potent than the sudden silence. She gasped as he stared at her from across the room, his band cutting the song short and the crowd turning in confusion as they wondered what he was looking at. "It's forever, Kerry, if you're ready now." His voice reverberated through the speakers, and the room fell quiet as the glass in her hand shattered against the floor and she stood.

She was silent for a handful of moments, unable to find her voice through the tears forming and cresting over her cheeks. Impatiently, she swiped them away as he watched, as everyone watched.

She should have known that he had understood and known from the beginning why she turned him away. He had always understood her motivations better than she herself did.

He would understand that her answer now was permanent. There was no going back on her word to him, once she made it.

"Yes," she said simply, and grinned.

The End