#lefter

“I hate this,” Clay muttered with a sigh. 

Lefter glanced at his companion as they descended stone steps into a grizzly marketplace of verboten wares. This shadowed nook of the Catacombs had become a temporary gathering place for dealers whose merchandise was too nakedly unethical even for the plausible deniability of Almonte’s Auction House. The time and place changed at erratic intervals. However,  Lefter Shkreli had wallowed in the underworld’s sordid depths long enough that a discrete inquiry into the right ear at the Bloody Stake had given him the details. Lefter supposed the fact that his entry into this den of iniquity aroused no hint of surprise constituted a slight against his character. God bless those halcyon days back when Lefter had so little to worry about that the ephemeral opinions of others loomed large in his thoughts. 

Hale would be a problem however. 

Ah yes there it was, that furrowing of brows, a firm set of the jaw on a too-impassive face, and dark eyes flicking between shadowed stalls of corrupt commodities without even a pretense of interest. 

When Clay suggested this plan, of posing as one of Lefter’s associates in this darkest of markets, he’d been so surprised when Lefter had burst out laughing. Clay had fought the darkness and savagery but never been a part of it. He could never imagine himself in the shoes of those desperate and broken enough to peruse these dingy tables of noxious vials, powders, and profane talismans. While Lefter had been that person and knew that dissolute state of mind all too well, Clay couldn’t play that part convincingly

No, Clay would rather die than stoop that low, a fact Lefter couldn’t help but both admire and despise him for. Everywhere he looked, Lefter saw his past self in another’s shoes. What did Clay see? Lefter didn’t dare ask, knowing that regardless if Clay answered truthfully or told a kind white lie, it would cut deep in different places. 

“Come on,” Lefter said, throwing his arm around Clay’s shoulders and pulling the other man’s sinewy frame against his. “You are my bloodbag tonight,” he murmured in Clay’s ear, flicking his chin with the reminder. “Just another mortal hopelessly enraptured by the allure of my gothic majesty,” Clay teased, enjoying the palpable tenseness of the Slayer’s discomfort as he took the lead down the rows of iniquitous offerings. 

“...do you make the ladies call it that when you drop trow,” scoffed Clay.

“Fuck you,” Lefter huffed, roughly boxing one his ‘date’s’ ears as he led them towards the main event, but carefully avoiding the impression they were in a hurry. “Don’t make me turn this car around.” 

Clay pulled his sweatshirt’s hood further up over his face as he muttered obscenities in Lefter’s shoulder, allowing himself to become just another object being sampled in this cold subterranean chamber full of cages, vials, and flesh. 

They both knew that Lefter could just shout a word, Clay’s true nature, and the patrons here swarm them in numbers even the mutant soldier couldn’t fight off. He’d been strung up and drained of the rare vitality in his veins. The death Clay’d suffer down here would be sort of thing that’d have forced Dante to write up a new layer in his Inferno. 

Lefter was not half so redeemed that such a comeuppance never tempted him as he walked with a vampire hunter in his embrace. Nor was Lefter so pure that he wasn’t curious how long Clay would last against the torment. Would he die noble and defiant? Or would Lefter see the hunter’s final limit at last, that horizon of suffering where people devolve into sobbing animals bleating for the pain to stop. Lefter’s cold fingers caressed the living warmth of Clay’s neck, pretending to appraise a collection of obsidian amulets carved with white demonic sigils, while his chest actually ached at the thought of what drinking Clay’s filtered Slayer blood would be like. Familiarity and the play-acting of intimacy with Clay only make the lust bloom more painfully. What would it like for Clay’s strength to become his, to not have to be this broken damaged thing anymore. 

Resistance tugged Lefter to standstill and the vampire rounded on his companion, fangs bared in the irritability of rising lust. “What are you…”

The Hunter had come to a standstill on the stone floor that’d thrown off Lefter stride. The vampire’s snarl stilled when he wasn’t greeted with another stupid joke or innuendo. Clay had frozen as he stared at something on the other side of the bazaar alley from them. Still brimming with murderous ideation, Lefter followed companion’s gaze. 

A tall woman with elfin ears and a pair of curled horns stood in front of a small crowd of people seated in rows of lawn chairs. People of a wide selection of ages, genders, and body type were sorted in rows like a tastefully arranged selection of wines. They wore little more than spare hospital gowns and on each of their foreheads was a barcode tag. The human wares had no restraints on them, but nevertheless sat in their chairs in a posture too rigid and motionless to be natural. The shopkeeper's several pairs of membranous mosquito wings hummed like eager violin strings as a potential customer approached. Her silvery voice extolled the virtues of certain specimens. A buyer in a grinning mask stated what his very specific ‘tastes’ were. The shopkeeper’s musical laughter assured him that it would be no problem at all. Her clawed finger crooked and one of the promise-bound captives lurched to their feet like a marionette with their strings being pulled. 

Lefter encircled Clay in a wrestler’s embrace a second before the Hunter could launch himself at the ringleader like a human missile. “Stop,” he hissed in Clay’s ear as the vampire’s own unnatural strength by the slayer’s attempts to shake him off. “Stop! Clay! You can’t help them. You wouldn’t make it to the next chamber before the guards gunned the whole lot of you down.” 

The inescapable truth of it stilled Clay’s struggling, but the Hunter stood stock-still, staring at this subjugation and commodification of the human with an expression like a man having his gut stabbed by a jagged knife. 

Once again, Lefter looked at the Faerie woman selling her human wares and saw himself with a different face. Bloodlust succumbed to shame. Thoughts of betrayal died with the certainty that the only reason Clay didn’t regard him the same way he was looking at his merchant was ignorance.  

“C’mon,” urged Lefter, “you can’t offer them anything,” he said, leading Clay away from the morbid flesh market before the hunter could do something selfless and stupid. “You're here to help Detective Stryder,” the vampire reminded him, “to find what’s being done with the Fury blood. One crisis at a time.” 

Clay led himself down the lightless alleyways of the market, letting himself be encircled like a possession by one of Lefter’s arms, his hooded head resting against the vampire’s shoulder. Other things of the night glanced at them with glowing eyes and only saw a Vampire with a compliant blood thrall before their attention turned elsewhere. 

At one point Lefter felt a wetness on his shirt where Clay’s face was buried in his shoulder, but he gave his companion the mercy of inattention. 

So, the Hartvlinder hadn’t quite taken everything after all. 

Lefter led the way towards the high stakes auction with a well heeled confidence. He didn’t threaten or hiss like some freshly turned stripling, but members of the audience give him right of way with the nonverbal understanding that becomes reflex within the lethal hierarchy of experienced predators. Lefter brushed past ghouls, goblins, and cutthroats of every variety to take his place with his blood date within the pack, but not so near the front as to jostle with the true heavy hitters of the supernatural underworld. Lefter was unhinged even on his good days, but his death had not been an experience he was eager to repeat. 

Lefter listened to a pair of sorcerers on a podium explain to the crowd of spectators about the miraculous immortal blood they had acquired. It was true life-everlasting, the essence of the legendary Greek furies! Their spell-weaving had transformed that spark of divinity! The sales pitch proceeded in this manner for some time as an assistant came forward with a pale porcelain vase filled with a fragrant crimson cream. Lefter was not the only vampire in the audience to instinctively lean forward at the aroma. 

“Our first buyer!” 

Lefter followed the Spellcaster’s pointing finger and saw a venerable woman emerge from the crowd. She inched forward on crutches and such was the marketer's ballsy sense of the dramatic, that they made no effort to help her towards the podium as an entire crowd of volatile predators and criminals watched in a silence broken only by metallic squeaks. The buyer, Dora Belanger apparently, ascended the podium and was carefully disrobed before the audience. The merchant mages explained what she had purchased and understanding dawned on Lefter. 

“Hale,” Lefter murmured, reaching up to grip Clay’s chin and forcefully turned his head towards the spectacle as the assistance lowered the porcelain vase of refined Fury blood. “You’ll want to see this.” 

The sorcerers rubbed the crimson lotion into Dora’s skin, running their hands over every crevice, curve, and vein. The fury extract slithered into Dora’s flesh as if something ravenous inside her were greedily sucking it up. Wrinkled smoothed. Veins sank back below expanding muscle. Loose skin tightened and vigor rushed through the centenarian's thin limbs. Stolen life flooded into Dora Belanger. When she sprang up from the chair, a woman born before the advent of the Model T. car could’ve won homecoming queen at any American High School. 

“Shiiiiiiiiiiiiit…,” Clay breathed.