“Like you’re better, Mister actually just bleeds black smoke and acts like that’s natural.”

“I am a shadow, Dave.”

“You’re pale and fanged and turn into a cloud of directionally challenged bats.” He helpfully waves a talon at you, like you might not have noticed your own condition until he pointed it out. “You’re a vampire.”

“I am a vampire’s shadow that was left behind when he became human, we’ve talked about this, and I-” You pause, snapping the book shut with an affronted huff. “Directonally challenged?” The nerve of this overgrown tit- “It seems my theory your brain is the same size as the pigeon who fathered you is gaining validation.”

“You love me,” he drawls, freeing one wing to drape it around your shoulders. “One day we’re gonna have to get our flap on and go hunt out that pigeon so you can get down in front of him and chirp that you wanna make a nest with the fun hunk of monstrous dude he spawned, and he’s gonna blink at you and coo because he has no clue what words are, and then I’m gonna eat him and that’s gonna mean sure.”

“You seem fairly confident I am going to wish to stay.”

“Even if you wanted to leave, you’d just crash into a barn again and flop around on the ground until I came to collect you.”

He is a terrible, talkative, ridiculous ass, and he is also frustratingly correct.

“Besides, my daddy ain’t a pigeon. He’s that flighty prick with the fancy red robes who needs to shove his magical artefacts up his ass instead of making more freaks of nature that remember how shitty it is to be him.” Dave lifts himself up, dropping his feet to dig into the furs you’ve gathered to sleep on as he turns his head to peer out of the cave entrance and out towards the horizon that looms far beyond your cliff-face home. “Somewhere out there he’s making his circus of accidental whatever the heck we ares, and I’d sooner cook myself for a Yule-time roast that put either of us within a league of him.”

“You could always meet my... father. He is pleasant enough, if you ignore the manipulating, self-loathing attitude and the fact the manic preacher who follows him around tries to douse me in holy water each time we meet.”

“Sounds like a riot.”

“It is certainly something.”

You reach out and thread your fingers into his feathers, scratching gently at the skin beneath them and keeping your smile small when he tilts his head away from you and gives a pleased, shivery coo. Honestly, the men beyond this place don’t matter, not as long as he’s here with you. The forgotten truths that spawned cracked reflections can live their happy lives, and you’ll live one that is yours and yours alone.

“What’s it like, though?” Dave murmurs, eyes shut and wing gathered protectively around you. “When you do bite someone, I mean? You still do that, right?”

“I do.”

“Does it hurt them? I’ve seen you do that thing where you make a guy swoon into your arms, and it didn’t, uh. It didn’t sound like he didn’t like it.”

Hm.

“I’ve been told it feels rather pleasant,” you reply truthfully. “Cold, at first, but warm after, a poison that makes it easy to keep my offerings calm and placid and rather content to let me drain them as dry as I want. That’s a waste, though, that’s the secret. You drink a little, and it comes back, and they remember it wasn’t painful so they go under ever faster when you mesmerise them again.”

“Is that so?” Dave asks in as casual a voice as he can manage with a hum of delight in his throat and too much curiosity leaking out between the syllables for him to disguise.

“Do you know what I think happens when you drink Harpy blood?” You ask him, and Dave cracks open one luminous amber eye, thin pupil sliding back to focus on your face.

You smile at him, and show fangs over the mist that licks up in your throat.