ain't that a shame?

Her fingers twitch, but she tries not to show the emotion on her broken features. His question though, brings the tips of her shaking fingers to the corner of her mouth, tracing along the ridged scars left from the venom knife.

Vampires - his previous thought rattles around in his mind. He'd dropped his guard when he'd run into Lara in this dingy town. Let more than just his sister inside the palisades he'd spent years and years building - walls not just meant to keep people out but to keep him in. He's seen what happens to Vampires who give up what's left of them.

That thought draws his eyes back to his sister, to the proof of it that's scratched into her face. "Yeah," he agrees. He doesn't have the energy for an argument.

He's littered with bruises and healing damage - most of it gone by the time she'd arrived, but she can see the edges of just how bad it would have been. Idly scratching at her own scars, she reaches across and nudges his knee gently with a hand.

It's him being smart-assed, yes, but it's also him saying 'Vampires'

"Had to take care of some in-house stuff, hush-hush. It's fine, nothin's gonna follow me here, don't worry." If that's what she's worried about.

He turns the bag around in his hand; he'd split some with the kid on the way back but... he'll take it, even if staleblood's never quite pleasant. He tears the tube open, drinking, feeling the electricity of unlife surge again, bolstering more repairs to his aching body. "Why do we only feel things when it's painful, ever wonder that?"

He turns and stares at the crack in the slats he'd earlier peeked through, and titters at the crate: "You's causin' me trouble, you knows that?"

Then he's lookin' right back at the lad, new suspicion rising outta the gutter.

Least he's an honest one. Saves Garrick the effort of sifting through every fuckin' line.

"You's young," Garrick says, digging a finger inside the hole in his leg. A snap of his tongue, before adding with a half laugh: "I knows that, 'cause you ain't speakin' to some like that without seeing the back end of where it gets you." Boy's gonna get smoked, if he don't watch it. Garrick's in the business of toppling big towers and businesses tailored for the people; he don't go for the little man; he gives them the gold, and says be fuckin' good. Ain't nothing worse than ending up like the shmuck it was taken from.

Forefinger finds the bullet, and as it moves, Garrick hisses.

There's the nasty jab. It had to kick in, sometime. Immortality ain't so painless.

"Dan's fine. Rivkin."

He keeps the gun pointed, in case he needs it. No harm in a full name - anything official only brings up search results about Great War soldiers missing and presumed dead. There's a slight twist of instant regret, when he considers he needs to consider Lara now, but he'll make quick work if he needs to.

"My cool vampire club's got dibs on that, bud." He says. "Best I can get you is an IOU and a gift card to Rascal Jacks, which seems like it might be a thing you're into."

She hands the vial back over. "I'm good." She nods and hoists herself back up to her feet, wiping herself off. Does Daniel know she's killed more than just the club, the initiation, and this hit? Probably. But none of it has really phased her, and she doesn't particularly give a shit about some vampire who she'd never met before.

Someone.

Not his circus or his monkeys though, even if he can't help harbor an ounce of curiosity as to why Reardon is trafficking in cremated remains - apparently ones so important it warranted killing one of Reardon's many courier crews just to keep it quiet.

Lock it down, he thinks to himself. Suck it up. He takes her hand-up, and sorts himself as best he can.

"I have packs in the car," he says, taking off - not waiting; she'll follow, she's smart.

Daniel walks quickly, before he turns, dropping a hand onto her shoulder. "Hey. Looking at that usb, I don't know if that's smart." Looking her over, he shakes his head. "If it was important enough for us to have to take out two of our own over I... I'm not sure I need or want to know."

He won't stop her, but he wants to make his thoughts on the matter clear, here. "There's such a thing as knowing too much, even to people like us."

The commotion not too far from her sounds far more involved than what she'd just been through, but it ends just as abruptly as it's started. The bleeding on her head and hands have stopped, and the bleeding inside her brain has, too. Everything starts to stitch itself back together, but the massive bruises are taking longer. She needs to feed, she thinks.

Daniel's back presses against the wall as he braces himself, broken bones welding themselves back together as stolen blood burns itself inside his veins to speed it all along. He unzips the package; a flash drive and a set of ampules, each one with grains of boney ash inside. "The fuck even is this stuff for."

He looks back to Aria, shaking his head. "You good?" He's not talking about her cuts and bruises and broken bones - they'll both be back to normal by the time the sun comes up.

She runs her tongue over her teeth, and nods at him. The building is practically empty, an old office building of some sort where they're hiding out. Daniel's already entering in through a window, and Aria's mind tries not to flit back to the bookstore - where her fiance sleeps.

When she gets in, she slides down the walk as quietly as possible. She doesn't get the option of listening for a heartbeat or breathing, so she looks around for a way to get the high ground. There's not really much, but she finds the stairwell and the elevator that leads up to the second floor where she's sure they're hiding in. She's lost sight of Daniel, which is all well and good.

She takes the stairwell, and waits for the sound of footsteps or a door. There's a very quiet sound that takes her by surprise behind her, and the next thing she knows her head is being bounced off the concrete wall. Stunned, she shakes her head and scrambles out of arm's reach. It's the blonde, she realizes, and she snarls - trying to remember that it's her or them. And she has so much more to live for.

It's less a choreographed fight and more of a brawl. Hands scrape brick and concrete, heads crack and split, she feels bones snap under the weight of her hand, and feels her own skin break. By the time they make it to the next floor, they're both covered in blood and Aria is dragging her foot behind her. The other vampire's arm hangs limply by her side.

Both his and the face of The Courier are wrapped up in vicious snarls, eyes flooded red, fangs glistening in the dark. It's not the first time he's been here, but the notion that it might be the last is everpresent.

His other arm's busy too, grinding the bones of a wrist into dust to keep it from plunging it's grip around his neck tight enough to rip his head from its seam.

the Courier seems to pivot his intent though, and works his hand in a different trajectory, causing Daniel's resistance to falter. The humb goes into his eye, and his cry of pain echoes out through the halls before the spike of desperate survival gives him the push enough to throw the other vampire free. It gives him long enough to stumble in Aria's direction before a rush of speed slams him against one wall, then another. He catches him on the third, using the momentum to send him crashing through drawall and plaster.

Vision faltering for one eye's flooding with blood, he stumbles through the hole and rips the jagged edge of a stud free from its moorings before the other vampire is once again on top of him. "Bravest you've ever been," Daniel spits as they wrestle for the weapon.

There's another sound from Aria's direction, enough to distract him long enough for his oppoent to rip the weapon free and drive it through the wound in Daniel's chest. He feels ribs split and spread, feels splinter dig like fire into his hand as he stops it. They struggle, Daniel feeling his resistance falter before he glances to the side, seeiing salvation in a bit of toppled office equipment.

He lets the wood dig further in, can feel it in front of his hear, but it's just enough for him to wrench the arm from a paper cutter, and in a single swing he watches the Courier's body fall limp to the floor before it begins to calcify into ash. Daniels falls to the floor, paralyzed with pain. "You alive?" He cries out, not sure who will answer.

These orders come from much higher up than she's used to dealing with, so it puts more on edge, too. There's no need to ask what the envelope is or what he means, because he's already put that boundary up. All that's left is to do it.

He tells her this because he knows he would.

"I'll go for the guy."

That one's older than either of them put together. It won't be the first old-head vampire he's taken down, but every one could be the last. It puts a greasy film of apprehension over his thoughts to consider what the two of them are about to do. It wasn't all that long ago that the four of them were on the same side.

"Once they're ash, we get what they're carrying and we burn it."

He's not supposed to know what it is, but he does. It's for the best.

—

The car had been parked a few blocks away, to avoid suspicion or alert. Daniel moves across rooftops like a shadow, darting across the gaps like some spy out of an action flick, but he never goes far from Aria until they've reached the building.

Reardon's supplied them with information - he wonders how it is they're being tracked. If its some sort of spell or some wackadoo shit. He'll have to deal with that eventually, too, if he ever grows enough of a spine to get out of this hellhole without a rat tail a mile long for them to follow. Another glance at Aria. Her too.

With a sigh, she tilts and shakes her head, sipping on more of the blood-tinged wine. What resolution would she even have? A lot of her life since her turn has been spent floating around without a goal or care. But she has.. something of an idea. "I think I'm gonna learn to sculpt."

"Mostly." He laughs out a single word as he sips his drink and tries not to be so tense. "I mean, don't get me wrong, it's all very quaint this Pacific Northwest Slow Living thing his place has going on - maybe that's what's keeping me here, hm?"

Yet here he is, scowling at his leg with a hole through the thigh.

Garrick didn't have no interest in the contents of the cargo til he's got some grody nosebleed pointing a pistol at him. It'd be a fuckin' gas if it didn't sting like hell.

"You's got some nerve, ain't you?" Principle says that he's gonna take interest in whatever's got him some heat now. 'Course it'd be another stillhearted shmuck, too. "You ain't never heard of askin', boy?"

It'd probably get him further than this would.

Whilst gunsmoke curls from the stranger's weapon, Garrick's relighting his extinguished bone, trapped between fingers and propping it back between lips. He don't wanna let it go easy, but he don't wanna make no mess, either. He likes the place a lil too much to get caught dismembering a lad on the slats.

So, half threat, half humour, he offers the stranger a bit of patience, an' it ain't something he's famous for. "Wanna try this again?"

The pistol sits couched in a practiced hand; close to the body; but the way the bullet's done fuck all has already told him its applications are sharply limited; he's carried wood slugs before, but even those are all but a short term solution, and they can be turned on you quickly.

Daniel's leer thins briefly, before his eyes open back up, and he lowers the gun.

"Not particularly interested in the answer-" Tangling with a fellow vamp is always a war of attrition when you haven't planned ahead. All fun and games until somebody's head comes off or their heart comes out. "So if you'll just uh, set that down, I can take it, fuck off, and you can dig the bullet out of your leg."

His head tilts and the nonchalance of it all. It tells him a few things: for one, Daniel has more to worry about from this guy than vice versa, and for another, this is more accident than intentional.

The candles lit, blessings spoken, Daniel sits in the den of Lara's home, infinitely more spread out than her apartment, and he reflects on the idea that it's the first time he's been here since she moved. How little time he's spent with her while he's been out busy making things work for others who have failed to deliver on their end of things. His eyes cant from the window to the menorah and then around the place - he hasn't celebrated anything in decades, so its almost like he's sitting in a dream.

Its a bit of a personal failing, he realizes - as it has gotten him no closer to the reason he'd drifted into this weird little pocket of a city, and he feels he's been ignoring the one good thing to come of it so far.

So - messy business aside (and it is messy business, but he can separate business and family, he just needs to try), he's decided that he won't be answering his phone for the next week and a half. Call it PTO.

"This is weird," he says, sipping blood-laced wine on a couch as if this is just how things've always been done. "Is this not weird to you, putting blood in things so it tastes normal? I didn't even know this was a thing."

He takes another sip before shrugging - it does work, he can't lie.

"It's a little weird, but you get used to it." She laughs, sipping her own blood-spiked wine. It's not really a novelty to her anymore than it used to be. She pulls her feet underneath her in a more comfortable sitting position, trying to ignore the itch of the scars on her face.

"Helps with the appearing human bit when I have to, you know. Plus - who can deny a drive-in burger from time to time, yeah?"

She waits a beat, then. "I'm glad you're staying, Dan. I didn't think you would."

Getting used to the image of his sister hurt the way she is is hard. In so many ways, Lara looks like she always has in his mind, but the drag of gnarled, injured skin across her face, it makes a dead heart beat with something that isn't blood. If he'd been around sooner, would this have happened?

It builds on other resentments. The guy, the woman. He doesn't trust them. He might pretend to, especially with this girl Lara's barking up, but he doesn't.

The instructions are straightforward enough - but there's something beneath the kill order that tells them to wipe out all information they have on them, find safe houses they own or where they might store back up files. Double fuck.

He slips her a small, hand-made envelope. Inside is a few things, scratched into paper. "Don't open this unless you need to. It's... whatever you might need to get other people - people like you and me - off your trail. You open that, you use it, okay? I'm not going to talk about it any more than that."

He turns back to the wheel and drives off.

She's finishing up her last pull on the cigarette when Daniel pulls up. The call had come not even an hour ago - Aria was meant to shadow him on this next job, and it needed to be done urgently. Peeling out of bed away from Autumn was hard enough on its own, and she doesn't really feel the chill in the air, but she still finds herself grumbling about it under her breath as she dresses.

Urgent, she muses, as she flicks the rest of the ash out, and stubs the butt of it on the bottom of her shoe, and set its on the window sill to clean up when she gets back home. When she slides into the passenger seat, Aria looks over at him and waves the burner before shoving it back into her pocket.

He leans over, pulls open the glove box, and tosses her a burner. "It's in the files on there." Names. Photos. Instructions. Kill. He knows the two of them, Aria knows the two of them. "Before you say anything - it's the two of them or it's the four of us, Reardon's cleaning house here from the top down.""

Soldiers are a strange breed, she thinks. Feels to her like they can shut it off better than most vampires. But the lab with its harsh fluorescents, scant furnishings, and the dangerously alluring scent of blood permeating every square inch of the place leaves very little to hide behind.

Idly, her eyes track the path of his veins up his arm. Then, in a flat voice: "Towards the end of his tour in Afghanistan, my husband saw one of his friends get blown up by an IED. Right in front of him. The IED was hidden in an animal carcass. Figure I don't need to tell you all the ways it stayed with him. It was rare to hear him talk about it, but when he did he always had to make the same stupid joke, like he couldn't get any of it out otherwise. He'd force himself to smile and he'd say— 'Wile E. Coyote spent too much time strapping dynamite to rockets. Someone should've told him all he needed was one dead donkey on the side of the road.'"

He stares at her for a long while, or what seems like it, and that narrow stare darkens into something else, and the silence between them becomes this fat, engorged thing, thick with the quiet its sucked up like a leech on an artery.

Fine, then, he decides.