regina carnifexa

Leo tries distracting himself with cleaning the crossbow on his lap. It isn’t his, but as the hunters’ designated armorer, he likes to get personal. The irony is that the owner will go out explicitly to kill or capture the kind of monsters Leo’s in the presence of right now. At that reminder, he loses most of his enthusiasm for polishing the gears. He wipes his hands from the grime and puts the equipment away.

Piper folds further down to whisper something. All Jason does is close his eyes, mouth forming a small smile. Piper gets back fully on the bed and drops her face straight into it, her long dark hair obscuring the entire top half of her body.

“Looks like we actually do have a lot in common,” Jason says, his eyes still shut, as though he was trying to sleep. The afternoon light filters through a sliver of opening left by the blackout curtains. “Same likes.”

It feels baiting. “Like what?”

Jason waits, as though he expects Piper to answer. When she doesn’t, he continues, “We like to bite.”

“Okay,” he says slowly. “So do fish.”

“We like to bite you,” Jason clarifies, making Leo flush all the way down to his collar.

On cue, Piper turns her head from the sheets just to speak. “Leo,” she calls quietly, almost sheepish, “I’m hungry.”

His blood is still rushing, which is maybe a good thing for the situation at hand. Distantly, in the back of his mind, Leo hears the warning of every hunter he ever knew growing up: Never let a vampire bite you. Just once is enough for them to stake a claim. Most operatives would kill themselves before allowing such a travesty to happen to them. What does it say about Leo that this will be the sixth time? That again, he’ll lie prone under her cool hands, allow her lips to kiss his skin, then break into his wanting flesh?

Leo can’t bring himself to care about repercussions anymore. Besides, Jason’s the werewolf. And he’s done worse to Leo than bite.

The bed creaks a little when he sits beside her. Piper rolls to her side, arms splayed out comfortably, peeking out from her fringe up at Leo. She looks as young as him, like she could be any other college-aged kid, even if that can’t be quite accurate.

“Sorry,” she says, almost at default.

Leo can’t actually say that it was okay, because it maybe isn’t. He doesn’t like to lie to her. Instead, he places his palms down on either side of her head and admits, “I like it. Getting bit.”

He can’t see Jason from here, but Leo hears him give out a short laugh. 

“Even if it hurts?” Piper doesn’t seem to believe him.

He bends down, parts the hair over her forehead and presses an upside down kiss to it. She smells like lavender oil. He wonders what he smells like now. Certainly not lavender.

He says, “I think I kind of like that, too.”

Piper gets herself to sit up, then gently urges him to settle against the backboard, a pillow behind him. Leo looks into her eyes, flashing an unearthly yellow, then red, then brown again, and can’t help the goofy smile that comes on.

“I thought you didn’t like making a mess in here,” he teases. His fingers flex in and out, anticipating. 

“We’ll just make the puppy clean it up,” she tells him.

“I’m so abused,” replies Jason. He’s still awake, but he also wouldn’t sleep through something like this. At least Piper stashed his glasses away at some point, just for fun. What kind of werewolf had shitty vision?

Instinctively, before she even starts, Leo feels the base of his neck, expecting mottled skin or scarred tissue from the times they’ve done this in the past. But what he touches is smooth, unmarred. The reason for this is what makes the moral quandary even more difficult: in order to heal beyond human capabilities of his own, Piper McLean feeds him her blood. 

The hunters—the only family he’s known since birth—would never stand for a vampire fledgling in their ranks. Even if he never became one of the night walkers, they might still kill him. He’s marked now. Stained.

Piper, seeing what must be some range of his emotions, cups his face in her hands, leaning close enough that all the world fell away around them like broken glass. For one moment, all that exists is her.

“Tell me to stop and I will,” she says, voice low, purposefully vulnerable.

It’s power she’s offering him, stronger than her own will-breaking compulsion or Jason’s ability to leap impossible bounds. She’s giving him the power to decide what their future would look like, with or without him in their lives.

Luckily, Leo has already made his choice.

He mimics the line Piper had drawn on Jason down her own throat, a trail he follows with his lips once he leans into her. Piper McLean is heiress to the most dangerous, ancient vampire brood in the northern hemisphere. Out in the world, she is daring, cold, and undoubtedly feared. Here, she shivers at his every caress, gasps at the way the heat of his fingertips ignite as they travel beneath her nightshirt. Then he does something else—something new.

Piper jolts, riding a sudden wave of shock. “Leo!” she cries. He didn’t know vampires could flush, too; her complexion darkens with embarrassment as she opens and closes her mouth, unable to form a coherent sentence. She barely meets his eyes.

“What happened?” Jason asks, using a muscled arm to raise a part of himself over the foot of the bed. He doesn’t say it with much worry, only like he’d been meaning to look all this time and was finally glad for a reason.

Leo falls over her silk sheets in stitches. Piper picks up a pillow to try to smother him, still completely flustered. She quickly gives up and slaps one side of her neck—the same side where Leo had left a perfect indentation of his dull human teeth.

“He-he bit me!” 

Despite her reaction, Piper still appears dizzy, and Leo only knows it’s because she’s considering what’s tied all three of them together. The link they have is made of chains and the only way they can lose Leo is if they saw him off. Jason comes to stand, large and looming and lovable, squinting at them on the bed. Almost recovered, Piper examines her already healing mark with fascination, and maybe a sort of growing excitement.