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Song Lan is having a pretty bad night, and it just keeps getting worse.
It had started in a hospital. Small, locally-owned - well known to vampires like Song Lan, who don't feed on live prey if they can help it. Some people have a moral issue with it: he just finds it disgusting. People are filthy. His senses are too sharp not to know when someone hasn't washed their hands, or their hair, or cleaned their washing machine.
So he buys bags of blood, which are as sterile as bodily fluids can get. Not good, but better. He doesn't buy many at a time: they don't keep long, and they're fistfuls of cash that he doesn't like paying. He doesn't go often, either. The hospital overhead lights are the brightest thing he sees every month.
It's only as he's leaving through the sliding double doors that he realizes just how long it's been since he'd had anything to drink; he had perhaps left it too close for comfort. The frozen blood isn't even melting slowly against his skin - he doesn't have any warmth to share.
From the corner of his eye, he sees a flash, and turns towards it. In retrospect, it will feel like slow motion. In the moment, it is normal - a curiosity, car headlights glancing across a mirror where he does not expect the reflection.
It happens, from there, really very rapidly.
Song Lan feels a hard thump to his shoulder and is abruptly jolted sideways, driving him to his knees. A man - small, slim - ducks out of the car. Gun, Song Lan's brain alerts him gamely. The shooter raises it again - there are few things that can kill a vampire, but Song Lan is weak from the lack of blood and utterly baffled by the situation.
He does not want to die, but really - what choice does he have?
Another suppressed gunshot, but he doesn't feel this one. Instead, something hits him from behind and sends him sprawling. It breaks him from the numb, bewildered shock purely by how much he dislikes being on the ground. Something in front of him screeches - steel on steel? - but he finds himself disinterested in the particulars. He scrambles upright and leaves the sound of fighting behind, no particular goal in mind beyond away. He is not an animal, but in that moment, he feels like one.
There is a dark side street that Song Lan follows into an even darker alleyway, bracing his hand on the wall to keep himself upright before he suddenly can't. He sits down abruptly, feeling oddly grateful that he, at least, cannot feel nauseated.
He has a bullet in one shoulder and is absolutely drenched in blood, which only belongs to him inasmuch as he purchased it and would rather be drinking it than wearing it. The blood bag had burst when he'd fallen.
It's starting to snow. Song Lan doesn't feel the cold, particularly, but he's aware of it in the way his muscles begin to lock and every limb takes more effort to move.
He will, of course, be blaming his current situation on that. His body is using the last of its energy to try and heal the shoulder. That, he supects, will not work at all.
Song Lan opens his eyes and blinks to find shoes in front of him, directly in his line of sight. He tips his head back, eyes struggling to focus when he's staring straight into an alleyway spotlight.
There's a man standing over him, eyes on the wound in Song Lan's shoulder. Human. Song Lan can hear the hummingbird thrum of his heart. An expression that he can't read tucks into the corner of the man's mouth - disgust?
"What's a guy like you doing in a place like this?"
No, Song Lan thinks, not disgust. Worse. Amusement. Just his luck.
"Leaving," says Song Lan, which is a flat out lie: he is propped against the wall of the alleyway, and he doubts that his legs will support him. He's hungry - physiologically - and his muscles creak with the effort of moving them without enough blood.
"Ooh," says the guy, crouching in front of Song Lan and pulling a lollipop from his pocket. It smells of sickly sweet artificial cherry. Song Lan abruptly has a very bad feeling. "Kinda slow, though, huh? Are you gonna crawl?"
Never, Song Lan doesn't say, because he would frankly rather die when dawn comes than crawl anywhere. He's also finding himself increasingly perturbed by the man's casual nature in a back-alley crime scene.
"Who are you?" he wonders aloud - and it's though rare for him to say anything that he doesn't intend to, he finds that he's curious enough that he doesn't want to take it back.
"I am," the man leans closer, waving the lollipop an inch from Song Lan's nose before he finally pops it into his own mouth, "your new best friend! D'you know why?"
Song Lan doesn't, so he stays quiet. He also doesn't want a new best friend, but it feels childish to protest that aloud.
The silence stretches like taffy, the tension cherry-scented. It becomes clear that the man is willing to wait forever for Song Lan to reply. Song Lan, with the sun hours away but ticking ever-closer, is coming to the realization the he does not have forever.
"What do you want?" he asks at last.
"Oh, plenty," says the man, tapping the candy against his front teeth. It clacks in a way that sets Song Lan on edge. "We'll get into it. First thing I want? I want you to tell me why I'm your best friend."
"I don't know," Song Lan says, exasperated and made snappish by circumstance. "I don't know you."
"You don't have to," the man says, smiling around his lollipop. His teeth have been stained pink. "'Cos I know you, and I know that you're not the guy I got hired to kill, and that means that we're on the same side. And you know what that makes us?"
Song Lan doesn't need to breathe, but he takes a big inhale solely so he can blow it back out in a gusty sigh. "Best friends?"
"Now you're getting it," says, apparently, Song Lan's new best friend. "Name's Xue Yang, vampire hunter. But you should call me babydoll."
Song Lan will not be doing that. He lets his head fall back against the brick wall of the alleyway, even though it's filthy. He doesn't think he's on the same side as a vampire hunter, but he does know the phrase about looking in horse's mouths.
Xue Yang shuffles closer. "Get up, then," he says. "What're you lazing around for when there's murders to do?"
Song Lan is not a man who likes to admit weakness. He does not like putting himself into anyone else's hands. He does not trust Xue Yang, and he does not like the look on his face or the little smile that's tucked into the corner of his stained-red mouth.
However.
"I can't," Song admits, like the words are being pulled from him. "I'm too cold."
He sees immediately that Xue Yang takes his meaning - that he does not mean too cold in the human sense, where discomfort has peaked and he is no longer capable of overruling it. Rather, he means it in the physical sense, where the meat he wears has been frozen stiff and he does not have the blood to warm it. There is nothing left to circulate. The bullet wound isn't bleeding; he'd had nothing when he'd gone into the hospital, and now he's wearing what he would have eaten.
Xue Yang cocks his head. There is something unpleasantly evaluating in his face, like a hyena considering the most tender part of an otherwise tough animal.
"Ooh," he says in the end, mocking. "Biting on the first date. Do you think I'm that kind of girl?"
Song Lan doesn't know him at all, so he doesn't say yes.
"The hospital is steps away," he says instead. "I have cash."
"Too slow," Xue Yang tells him, shaking back a sleeve and exposing a narrow wrist. His blood is hot under the translucent skin; Song Lan can almost feel the warmth of it. Xue Yang waves it in front of Song Lan's face, grinning when Song Lan recoils. "I'm gonna start getting offended. What, you don't think I'm pretty enough?"
"No," Song Lan says flatly.
Xue Yang laughs. "Have it your way, princess."
For a moment, Song Lan thinks that Xue Yang is getting ready to stand and walk off - to buy blood, to leave him, to go hunt whoever he's hunting - and steels himself to be left in the snow that is steadily beginning to pile around him. Instead, spindly fingers find his jaw muscles and squeeze, forcing his mouth to drop open so his fangs are exposed.
Xue Yang nicks himself on one sharp tooth and they both watch as blood wells up along the cut, cartoonishly red in the dazzling spotlight. It drips from his wrist bone to Song Lan's tongue - one bright, hot drop, and then another.
Song Lan doesn't like fresh blood as a rule, but there is something about Xue Yang's. Song Lan justifies, internally, that it is simple hunger: a biological imperative that drives him to drink the life that's being offered to him.
The justification is immaterial; he finds himself reaching for Xue Yang's wrist and sealing his mouth around the cut, pressing his tongue to it to force more blood to the surface. Xue Yang laughs hoarsely and scrapes his fingernails against the bone of Song Lan's jaw - his fingers feel cold now, with the flush of warmth that Song Lan's stolen from him.
Song Lan doesn't lose control, but he takes more than he should or would otherwise. He will never admit it aloud, but it's better than a blood pack.
"Feel better?" Xue Yang asks. His tone is syrupy sympathetic, faker than the lollipop that he finally bites down on and shatters into candy dust. He doesn't seem any worse for wear - no wobble when he stands, no telltale flutter in his heartbeat.
Song Lan doesn't answer that, because it's obvious. He can feel how much better he's moving already, with the blood starting to circulate. He feels, at last, warm. The bullet in his shoulder pings to the ground and bounces as his flesh knits closed.
"How do you know we're on the same side?" Song Lan asks, taking the hand that Xue Yang offers to haul himself upright. "I don't know who was in the car."
"I've just got a feeling," Xue Yang says. He's obviously lying, but Song Lan doesn't know how to shake an answer out of him. "Hey, how are you at driving? I think there's a free car over there, and I think you owe me a favor."