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Geralt is against all odds winning. He’s trying very hard not to think about the state he’s in and how much pain he’ll be in when the fight is over, but for now it looks like he’s going to be alive for that part. Not something he was all that certain about, not after Regis went down leaving him alone against a higher vampire.
(Regis hesitated and Geralt… Geralt should not have hesitated. He knows better than to hesitate and unlike Regis has no personal stake in Dettlaff’s survival.)
Dettlaff’s rage slows him down, it must, as Geralt manages to dodge another swipe of his claws and before Dettlaff can lunge at him again, he sinks his sword into Dettlaff’s back.
Dettlaff falls to his knees, clutches at his own chest and something happens that makes Geralt’s amulet vibrate. It’s never given any warning in the presence of higher vampires, not once. Damn it, whatever is happening isn’t going to tip this fight in Geralt’s favor. He pauses in indecision – he could take a free strike or two now, but some feeling in his gut is screaming at him to run. Witchers aren’t supposed to be able to have that kind of feeling at all.
A swirling red mist raises from the ground and it takes Geralt a moment too long to realize it’s not just more of Dettlaff’s vampire smoke. Distracts him from finally doing something about Dettlaff, too.
Underneath the dirt and crumbled rock shines a red light in some kind of pattern that Geralt’s never seen before. It’s brightest where Dettlaff is still kneeling and then it spreads rapidly, several meters on all sides and the light starts getting brighter. Geralt realizes too late that he is now standing inside the circle of magical light and mist as well.
Right after Dettlaff rips his coat open, huge leathery wings erupt from his back. That’s when Geralt puts together that whatever’s happening with the ground has nothing to do with what Dettlaff is doing. He stumbles back, tries to get the hell out of the damn magic sigil, but he’s not fast enough.
Neither is Dettlaff – he roars and tries to take off the ground with his new wings, but the center of the sigil collapses in on itself and drags Dettlaff back down. It pulls Geralt in too, and a hastily cast Quen does absolutely nothing against the hold the magic has on him. Geralt barely keeps his hold on his own sword, as it’s the one thing that seems to vaguely repel the magic and so isn’t being dragged towards the swirling red center of the sigil along with Geralt.
The rest of it happens too fast for Geralt to try anything else. He doesn’t quite pass out, but the magic saturation inside the shining red hole in the ground makes him dizzy and unfocused for a minute. When the magic lets up enough, the first thing Geralt sees is Dettlaff, looking less monstrous than just a minute ago, but not by much. He looks like the magic’s taken a lot more out of him.
The chamber they’ve landed in is closer to the cells Geralt saw on his trip to the depths of Tesham Mutna, but it’s definitely not one of those he saw. There are unfamiliar sigils and script covering all the walls. The most glaring difference is there’s no door, not even any of the creepy bars that seemed to bother Regis more than they bothered him. The red hole in the roof has, of course, closed up after depositing the both of them inside.
After he makes sure there really isn’t any exit, Geralt turns back to Dettlaff. The vampire is still out cold and now mostly human-looking. There are trails of blood running down his chest visible where his clothes are torn. Some of the sigils on the ground are glowing red underneath him, where the blood is pooling on the floor. Explains what activated the magic that sucked them into the vampire part of the fortress, but doesn’t give Geralt any idea how the hell they’re going to get out of here.
Damn.
He should not–– he should be planning to get out on his own. He keeps hesitating and he really isn’t in the mood to think about why.
Dettlaff is down and Geralt could finish him off now. Or something like that, since only another vampire could really do it properly. He could get close, though. Geralt points his sword towards him, holds the tip finger's breadth from the side of Dettlaff’s neck. And keeps holding it for so long he knows a human would start feeling the strain in his arm.
Finally he curses, turns away from Dettlaff and starts examining the walls again. All the magic on them is unfamiliar. After a while he gets the distinct impression that if he were human, he’d be trying to scratch his own eyes out just from looking, but he has nothing better to do than stand around and hope Regis gets him out of this place and that he does it before Dettlaff wakes up.
He’s not that damn lucky.
“Where are we?” Dettlaff’s voice sounds scratchy and about as menacing as a voice can possibly get and the room distorts it into something even less human. The tone alone is the best damn threat Geralt’s ever heard.
“You tell me,” Geralt says and against every instinct he has keeps his back to Dettlaff. “You got us here.” Unintentionally, it seems, but Geralt’s still blaming all of this on him. He’s also really hoping the magic nap was enough to cool Dettlaff’s temper.
“What...” Nothing follows and the silence bothers Geralt more than anything Dettlaff could have said. He looks over his shoulder and is instantly a lot more worried. Dettlaff is still on the ground, only a little more upright than when he was unconscious. He’s staring at the walls, unnaturally still and with eyes as wide as they can probably get.
“What is on those walls?” He can already tell he doesn’t want to know, but he probably needs to, and he sure as hell needs to keep Dettlaff talking.
“The. It’s a magic trap,” Dettlaff says and Geralt stares at him. It takes him a moment to remember Dettlaff, human as he looks now, is not at all intimidated by anyone, even witchers.
“Figured that much out myself, seeing as I’m trapped here with you. What does it do?”
“It doesn’t matter. I’m able to resist it.” It would be a lot more convincing, if Dettlaff wasn’t still looking at the walls warily like he expected them to grow teeth and eat him.
“How do we get out of here?”
Dettlaff flinches almost imperceptibly at the question and damn it, Geralt really needs to know what the hell is on those walls.
“I don’t...” Dettlaff trails off as he examines the magic. “There’s a weak point. Faded over time.”
Geralt looks at the part of the wall Dettlaff is studying and sees no change from the rest of the sigils. He has no choice but to trust a vampire’s opinion on vampire magic, though.
After a short struggle to do it without touching the walls, Dettlaff gets up from the ground. The leathery wings Geralt couldn’t see well while Dettlaff was on the ground are folded at his back and make him look taller and a lot more obviously inhuman. Geralt can’t help but stare. He knows higher vampires are almost as far from being a human as one can get, but outside of a fight they’ve always looked human before.
Dettlaff gets closer to the spot of the wall that will hopefully help them escape. Geralt steps aside to keep some kind of distance, though not much of one, since the room isn’t much bigger than a cell.
Without any warning Dettlaff tries to punch through the wall with his vampire claws. They make a terrible screeching sound against the stone but don’t do any visible damage to the wall. He tries again and again until Geralt gives up looking tough and puts his palms over his ears to keep his remaining hearing intact.
After another few minutes of trying Dettlaff seems to give up. He looks drained and like he should be breathing hard.
“Silver?” Geralt asks. His sword is about the only useful thing he has on him.
“No,” Dettlaff says, but the way he’s looking at Geralt makes him think he’s not going to like whatever he says next. “Blood.”
Yeah, Geralt hates it.
“That’s not happening.” He knows he can’t really compete with a vampire on who sounds more threatening, but he damn well tries anyway.
“Blood is necessary to get us out of here.”
“There’s blood all over you,” Geralt says and looks pointedly at all the blood on Dettlaff’s chest.
“Human blood.”
Yeah, that’s pretty much where Geralt knew it was going, and he still hates it.
“I’m not human either.”
Dettlaff only makes a dismissive sound. “Close enough for this.”
“Pouring blood on these things is what got us dragged down here. Not sure I want to test what pouring some more will do.”
Dettlaff stays silent for a minute, and he looks like he’s trying to find the best way to word something. Him trying to find the best way to say something to Geralt, who he has no reason to coddle, gives Geralt an ominous feeling.
“You won’t be pouring it on the wall,” Dettlaff says and pauses again. “I need to drink it.”
“No.”
“You say that like you think I will need your permission,” Dettlaff says, his voice gravelly again.
“Remind me who just beat you in that fight?” Geralt adjusts his grip on his sword. Even with Dettlaff as weak as he apparently is, Geralt doesn’t like his chances in an enclosed space with a vampire.
Dettlaff growls at him but doesn’t attack. It’s something of a stalemate and they stand and look at each other. Minutes pass that way and Geralt wants to curse again. He knows he’s going to either give in or lose this stare-off. He’d probably do it without pause, too, if it was Regis asking, but it isn’t. He has no reason to trust Dettlaff. He might have wanted to, before, but not after everything that’s happened this night.
“Can we just wait for Regis to get us out of here?”
“He’d have to find us, first,” Dettlaff says, and tilts his head like he’s considering it. “He would need blood to break the magic, as well.”
Damn it. Geralt’s not going to make Regis go break his sobriety streak for him. He’d also rather not get drained of blood by a vampire. He wishes he didn’t already know which one he’s going to choose.
He really should have killed Dettlaff when he had the chance. Instead he hesitated every time he had the upper hand. He might as well agree, not like he can trust himself to go for the win, if it comes to a fight again.
“How much blood do you need?” he asks through gritted teeth.
Dettlaff unfortunately takes it for the permission Geralt really wishes it wasn’t and takes a step closer. It’s a really menacing step and Geralt moves back without even thinking about it. Dettlaff follows and Geralt keeps retreating until his back hits the wall. He braces himself, but the magic does nothing and Dettlaff doesn’t go straight for his throat either.
“Just,” Geralt says and puts a hand against Dettlaff’s chest in an overwhelmingly futile attempt to stop him. “Answer the damn question.”
“You’ll live, witcher,” Dettlaff says. Geralt can see his teeth lengthen in his mouth as he speaks.
“Really not as reassuring as you think it is.”
“I’m not attempting to reassure you.” Dettlaff grips his wrist and pushes his hand away, traps it against the wall, and leans closer.
Geralt’s distracted from his impending blood-loss when his hand touches the sigils on the wall. He can feel the magic and it’s even more unnerving than he suspected. It feels immense and he’s absolutely sure he’d never be able to break it on his own. It seems impossible that anyone could. Then the magic brushes over Dettlaff’s blood on his hand and the feel of it changes. It changes a lot.
“Is that sex magic?” What the hell. Explains what Dettlaff said he’d be resisting, though Geralt still has no idea how. Just that small brush against it has made him hard, and supposedly Dettlaff can feel it all the time. “Do I want to know what kind of experiments they were conducting here?”
He doesn’t. He’s trying his best not to think about it and to keep his hand away from the magic.
Dettlaff pauses, his teeth almost at Geralt’s throat. He doesn’t say anything, though, and on his next exhale Geralt feels teeth sink into his neck.
The first moment is agonizingly familiar, the moment where he fails and something takes a bite out of him, and then…
He can feel his own blood spilling out of his veins and into Dettlaff’s mouth, and it makes no sense that this would feel good, yet it does. It makes Geralt’s skin flush, his heartbeat faster. The panic he should feel is distant and mild and feels too similar to a thrill.
He can’t help it, his mind goes back to the sex magic, and then he realizes he’s gone from just hard to desperate for a release. He remembers something about this in the experiment notes he found, but he can’t think straight. He feels much too hot for being pressed between a stone wall and a vampire.
His hands have gone from pushing Dettlaff away to holding his head in place. Geralt knows with some distant part of his mind that he shouldn’t, and that there are reasons why he shouldn’t, but he can’t remember any right now. He presses closer to Dettlaff and tries to grind against him to get some kind of friction, anything.
He thinks he hears Dettlaff growl and then Dettlaff adjusts his grip on him. His teeth in Geralt’s neck shift a little and pain spreads all over his body. It doesn’t feel like any pain Geralt’s ever felt before. He knows he’s making noises, but he can’t stop, doesn’t want to stop.
Dettlaff takes another deep pull of blood, his lips sealed tight to Geralt’s skin, and Geralt feels it with his whole body. He doesn’t even have to try grinding against Dettlaff again, he comes from just the feel of his blood being drunk.
The blood-loss and pleasure make Geralt lightheaded enough that he barely feels it when Dettlaff stops. He has no idea how he ends up sitting on the ground, back still against the wall.
He does notice the screeching sound when Dettlaff starts trying to break through the wall again. It clears his head impressively fast.
By the time Geralt finds his sword on the ground and sheathes it, Dettlaff’s managed to scratch through one of the sigils on the wall. The next time he punches the wall it crumbles and the sigils all go dark.
There’s enough light outside that Geralt recognizes it as one of the tunnels Regis took him through before. Should be able to find his way out from there, or at least wait until Regis wakes up and lets him out.
Dettlaff is still standing between Geralt and the improvised doorway, though. He’s looking at Geralt like he’s never seen him before.
“You are not at all like I expected,” Dettlaff says, and after a pause where he looks like he might say more he dissolves into a deep red smoke and leaves.
Geralt’s just thankful he doesn’t have to talk about his reaction to the bite. The notes said something about people that trust the vampire… yeah, that’s not his case. He doesn’t want to know if it’s just how he reacts to higher vampire bites, or if this was a special exception.
He’s halfway down the hall when he notices the taste of blood. There’s a minute there between coming his brains out and sitting on the floor, listening to inhuman screeching that he doesn’t remember, and suddenly he really wishes he did. His lips are covered in blood; it makes no sense until he finds a reflective surface.
His face looks exactly like he’s been kissed by a vampire, red all over his mouth.
He has a lot of time to think about it as he waits for Regis.