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I was flipping channels the other day and accidentally found myself watching the tail end of "Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter". It made me think of Civil War era vampires, Western vampires, and then naturally M7. Um. So. Have a very long, very hastily written and very random M7 vampire AU?
Title: Beneath the Skin
Rating: PG-13
Fandom: The Magnificent Seven (TV)
Characters/Pairings: Ezra Standish, Nathan Jackson, original vampire characters, and a little bit of Buck. Nathan & Ezra, mostly
Summary: Ezra Standish can recognise a vampire on sight. He's not quite a hunter, aiming more for self-defence, but at a push he might be close enough to count. When a stagecoach full of vampires rolls into Four Corners, he finds himself pushed, and a great deal more besides. It turns out he's not the only one of the Seven nursing a dark supernatural secret
Wordcount: 8827
Warnings/Notes: Vampire AU, canon character as vampire, vampire hunters, period-typical racism, reference to slavery, violence, battle, some blood and gore, identity reveals, trust issues, reconciliation, friendship
Disclaimer: Not mine
Title: Beneath the Skin
Rating: PG-13
Fandom: The Magnificent Seven (TV)
Characters/Pairings: Ezra Standish, Nathan Jackson, original vampire characters, and a little bit of Buck. Nathan & Ezra, mostly
Summary: Ezra Standish can recognise a vampire on sight. He's not quite a hunter, aiming more for self-defence, but at a push he might be close enough to count. When a stagecoach full of vampires rolls into Four Corners, he finds himself pushed, and a great deal more besides. It turns out he's not the only one of the Seven nursing a dark supernatural secret
Wordcount: 8827
Warnings/Notes: Vampire AU, canon character as vampire, vampire hunters, period-typical racism, reference to slavery, violence, battle, some blood and gore, identity reveals, trust issues, reconciliation, friendship
Disclaimer: Not mine
Beneath the Skin
Four Corners drew its fair share of trouble. Since they'd set up shop as the Seven, maybe more than its fair share. Bank robbers, cattle barons, outlaw gangs, travelling murderers, they all seemed inexplicably drawn to the place. You'd be forgiven for thinking that there wasn't a single manner of monster that their little hamlet hadn't seen.
Any manner of human monster, that is. There were more than humans out here in the wilds of the west, however. In hindsight, Ezra thought, you'd think he'd have noticed their dearth in Four Corners before a bunch of them rode in to remind him.
They came in on the evening stage. It was still daylight out. The sun wouldn't go down for another couple of hours yet. Ezra knew that wasn't necessarily the impediment to their kind that many thought it was, however. And he knew, as soon as he set eyes on them, that these creatures were most definitely of a kind, and that kind was most definitely far from human. His cards fell still in his hands as he watched them step down off the coach, cold-eyed and cat-footed and slightly too graceful to be human, for all their otherwise masterful pretence at it.
Vampires. Three of 'em. The two passengers and the coachman. They were undead, every last one of them.
He looked away. Casually, of course, so as not to draw their attention, or indeed anyone else's. Never let the enemy know you recognise 'em. Vampires had enough advantages without a heads up on top of it, and crying out "Vampires! They're all vampires!" was a good way to get yourself run out of town as a crazy man. So he looked away, an idle scan of the street before he looked back at the cards in his hands, just as a ruse.
As he did so, though, he caught sight of someone else watching the newcomers. He caught Nathan's eyes across the street, the healer standing on the opposite boardwalk, and he saw in them the same recognition that anyone who knew to look would see in his own.
Nathan looked away first, as casual as Ezra had intended to be, and headed calmly back to his surgery. For his own part, Ezra couldn't quite help the slow blink of surprise, though he at least managed not to be looking at the vampires while he did it. Nathan? Of all people to know a vampire on sight ... Though, actually, Ezra supposed it might make sense. A healer ran across all sorts of injuries, from all sorts of causes, and Nathan had served in the Late Unpleasantness as well. There'd been more than a few blood suckers plying those battlefields, on either side. Ezra knew that for a fact. Maybe it did make a certain amount of sense.
Not the point right now, however. The point now was the three vamps who'd set down in their previously unblighted little town, and what the hell to do about them.
He swept up his cards and riffled them pointedly back into their deck while he thought about it. Buck glanced up beside him, briefly distracted from his admiring study of the ... Damn it. His study of two female vampires, so nicely disguised as beautiful young women, new to the town, tired from their journey, and maybe in need of a friendly gesture or two. Dang and blast it. Well, before anything else, Ezra would have to put a spoke in that wheel, wouldn't he?
"I wouldn't, if I were you," he said mildly, straightening his sleeve cuff and contriving to look unaffected. Buck frowned, glancing back over to where the creatures were fanning themselves in the evening sunshine, listening carefully to whatever the vampire disguised as the coachman was saying. It was a lovely pantomime, Ezra did admit. It was calculated perfectly to draw just the right kind of eyes, such those in the head of the man beside him.
"Why not?" Buck asked, smiling wistfully when they glanced his way and wiggling his fingers in a delighted little wave. "They look mighty fine to me. Just two pretty darlin's in need of a friendly face, and I'm thinking mine might just fit the bill."
Ezra didn't snort. Now was not the time to put the man's back up. He couldn't quite resist a wry grimace, though.
"Well, all right," he said, with careful disaffection as he shuffled the cards from one hand to the other. "If you want to end up with something important shrivelled inside your trousers, you go right ahead. Don't say I didn't warn you, though."
"What?!" Buck yelped, his head snapping around and both hands dropping into his lap right on cue. He stared wild-eyed at Ezra, and Ezra most definitely did not smirk. It took all of his considerable training to manage it, but he did not snicker at the man.
"I happen to recognise the lady on the left, that's all," he said, as calm as if they were having the most normal of conversations. "One of my mother's younger acquaintances, I believe. She has a most wonderful little powder that renders a man ... impotent, shall we say. Young ladies travelling alone need all the protection they can get, after all. I'm told she takes a particular satisfaction in slipping it to gentlemen she considers forward. Not that you could be considered that, my friend, gracious no, but like so many of us, I fear the lady might be inclined to, perhaps, shoot first and ask questions later? Of course, if you wish to risk it regardless ..."
"No, ah," Buck started, stammering slightly. He waved his hands in flustered dismissal, sneaking an alarmed glance back at the ladies in question. Who were, Ezra noted in some dismay, now frowning at them a little bit. "A man shouldn't bother a lady if she doesn't want to be bothered. I'm sure if she's interested, she'll let me know in her own time."
... Yes, she probably would, Ezra thought. Which was another worry, now that they'd seen that Buck was their kind of prey, but at least the great lug was unlikely to go wandering into the line of fire on his own recognisance now. There was only so much a man could do, and Ezra needed some time to think before he could do anything overt here. It would have to do for now.
Leaving Buck to his own devices for the moment, to nurse his drink and sneak alarmed glances at the ladies, Ezra moved to the table at the edge of the saloon's boardwalk and dealt himself out a hand of solitaire. Chances were reasonably high that the vampires would avail of either the saloon or the restaurant as part of their human guise, since every human who'd ever stepped off a stagecoach gravitated towards the nearest source of refreshment, and he wanted to be out of their direct path if they happened this way. Moving off would draw attention to himself, more than Buck's yelp already had, and besides, he needed to be close enough to see what they were doing. Whatever was going on here, and whatever he was going to end up having to do about it, he was going to need to keep an eye on them first.
Hah! What he was going to have to do? Ezra nearly shook his head at the thought. He damn well hoped he wouldn't have to do anything. Only an idiot went up against vampires if he could at all help it, and this was not what he'd signed on here to have to deal with. There hadn't been so much as a scent of the unnatural since he'd been here. He'd almost gotten to hoping that he might be safe. More damned fool he.
The question now, of course, was how much of a threat these vampires were, and in what manner they planned to leverage it. Even vampires wouldn't be so foolish as to openly injure a town of this size and, shall we say, reactionary nature. No. They'd plan for something more subtle, something that got them their meals with as little fuss as possible. They'd come here in the guise of a stagecoach, and that had to be for a reason. If they were a real coach, and intending to run through the night, they'd have a quick stop-off here for refreshment and to pick up new passengers before heading on. It was reasonably likely, then, that they intended to do just that. Only in this case, the passengers would shortly find themselves as the refreshment, as soon as the coach was far enough back out that nobody would hear the screams.
Rather shamefully, watching as the vampires finally sashayed past Buck into the shade of the saloon, Ezra found himself hoping that that was indeed what they planned. Especially since the other option was that they intended to spend the night here. If they merely picked up some victims and left again, then he wouldn't necessarily have to do anything about it. If they spent the night in the town, then somebody would be dead or wounded before morning, and Ezra would have to deal with it.
More dangerously, he might have to explain it, and never in his life had he ever seen that end well. People did not look kindly on a madman yammering on about monsters of the night while the blood of two young women lay on his hands. That kind of thing lead to a rope around the neck. While Ezra might chance telling the other members of the group if he absolutely had to, especially if Nathan knew as much as he suddenly seemed to and could therefore back him up, it was still a far, far greater risk than he preferred to have to take, and there was no way in hell he was getting himself into a position where he'd have to explain to the townsfolk.
No. Better for everyone if the creatures intended to lure themselves some passengers and move on to eat them at their leisure. It would be very unfortunate for the passengers in question, of course, but it would mean that the whole thing was more or less not his problem. There was no-one in town due for a trip elsewhere at present, meaning that any prospective victims would be strangers to him, and thus not his responsibility. Stage travel was risky. Everyone knew that. You made your own way, and you accepted your own consequences. In all likelihood, that was why the vampires had set up as a stage in the first place. People all too often didn't look for missing travellers, especially if they were strangers to those around them. That was just the way of the world. Whoever got in that coach, whoever these vampires took, they wouldn't be Ezra's friends. They wouldn't ... they wouldn't be his concern ...
Goddamnit. Even as he thought it, Ezra knew that it wasn't true. He felt his stomach sour within him, recognised guilt when he felt it. He shoved his chair back from the table and dropped his head back against the clapboard wall of the saloon. Buck looked him askance, but Ezra wasn't in the mood to care about that. Not when he had bigger problems. Those three creatures in the saloon behind him were his concern, and he damn well knew it.
They wouldn't have been. Once upon a time, even as little as a few months ago, he could have happily let whoever wanted to climb in that coach and ride off to be eaten, just so long as it wasn't him. Well, not happily, but he could have let them. He was not in the habit of public service. All the training his mother had given him had been for self-defence purposes only, when people like them made such very attractive targets to the monsters of the world. Who would miss an itinerant gambler if he disappeared? No-one, that's who, and so Ezra missed no-one else either. Everyone took their own chances, and everyone accepted their own consequences. That was how the world worked.
Not anymore. Not from the moment he'd tried to ride out of an Indian village under siege, and found that he couldn't manage it. Every moment since then had only hammered the change home. He couldn't leave it. Not anymore. He damn well couldn't pretend.
He sighed, sitting forward again to rub his face with his palm. Damn it. He wasn't even a proper hunter. He was a gambler who'd learned a trick or two in the interests of saving his own neck, and who so far had managed not to get himself exsanguinated for his troubles. If he picked up a stick and started poking a hornet's nest now, that was pretty likely to change. There was just no help for it, though.
First things first. He had to disable the coach, keep the vampires here. Counter-intuitive, maybe, when he could not under any circumstances let anyone else in the town know what they were or what he planned to do about it. Explanations, in this instance, were absolutely no-one's friend. But if the vampires managed to lure anyone into the coach and make it out of town with them, chances were good that whoever they were would be very, very dead by the time Ezra caught up with them, and that was rather the opposite of the point of this little venture. He'd figure out how to lure the creatures out of town sans victims later on. For now, he just had to make sure that the coach stayed right where it currently was.
Fortunately, that was something he'd had a great deal more experience with of late.
---
Damn it, Ezra thought, trailing after three all-but-flying vampires as they flitted away from the town. Damn it, he was just not cut out for this sort of thing! You'd think he'd have learned by now that heroics were for other people. They never worked out the way he wanted them to.
On the one hand, several parts of the plan, such as it was, had in fact gone as they were supposed to. A little surreptitious sabotage of the coach's under-straps and the left wheel rim, and according to a bewildered Yosemite it wouldn't be going anywhere until tomorrow afternoon at the earliest. There had been an ugly moment there where Ezra thought the coachman vampire had been about to take issue with the blacksmith over this, but one of the ladies prevailed on his finer, or at least more discreet, instincts. The vampires had been neatly snared in the town, and no-one any the wiser.
He'd also been able to get himself kitted out in reasonable order. He'd taken to not wearing the better part of his non-human arsenal since he'd come here, another sign of how life in this town was letting his standards slowly but surely slip away. His mother might have a point there. He'd had to take a few minutes to slip up to his room and fetch out the correct ammunition and sundry other items. Time was, he'd have had at least two nasty surprises on him at all times. He'd let himself get sloppy, he thought. He'd let himself feel safe, and when had that ever ended well for him? He shouldn't have needed a sudden vampire to point that out.
He had, however, managed to get himself outfitted any number of hours before their visitors were familiar enough with the town to consider seeking out their evening repast. He'd figured they'd leave it late, into the morning hours. It only made sense, for them to slip someone or someones unseen, get them out of town for the main event, and slip back closer to dawn. If they timed it right, picked the right victims, they'd have been long gone on the coach the next day before anyone even noticed. A stranger to the town would be first choice. Someone nobody would miss. There weren't that many in Four Corners right now, and Ezra had arranged by dint of a word or two and a well-timed bar brawl to have all of them under somebody's watch. That way, the creatures would have to look further afield for victims, one of the outlying homesteads, and that gave him time and space enough to catch up with them outside town.
That had been the plan, anyway. And it hadn't exactly gone wrong. The vampires had done exactly what he'd expected them to do, and so far they hadn't managed to catch anyone, though at the pace they were moving he was somewhat worried that they'd reach someone before he could catch up. Horses were too damn loud to go hunting with, and on foot he was having some problems.
That wasn't the real worry, though. They were heading out towards the Wells place, and Ezra had every confidence that Nettie Wells was both superstitious and belligerent enough to stay behind her threshold and put a shotgun shell in the first face as bothered her. Even a vampire would be temporarily discommoded by that. No, what worried Ezra was the knowledge of who else was out here ahead of him, probably on the same damned fool's errand, and with who knew what kind of experience to back him up.
Damned idiot healer. What the hell had Nathan been thinking, haring off after three vampires by himself? The surgery had been completely empty when Ezra had swung by, dark and silent as a grave. Not that Ezra had been thinking along those lines, no sir. Damn it. He didn't know what he'd expected Nathan to do when he'd gone there, he didn't even know what he'd wanted the man to do. He'd just thought, given that Nathan had had that look in his eyes earlier, given that Nathan had recognised what the creatures were, that Ezra had better at least check up on him before he headed out. Maybe ask for help. Hell, he didn't know himself, and the point had been rendered rather moot when he'd discovered the place empty and Nathan presumably out in the dark somewhere hunting vampires.
There'd been no point looking for him. The only thing Ezra'd been able to do was circle back to the vampires themselves, follow them out, and hope to God that he caught up to them before they stumbled over Nathan.
The problem with heroic plans that you couldn't tell anyone about, he decided grimly, was that nobody else knew enough to just sit still and cooperate with them.
A bloodcurdling scream chose that moment to interrupt his disgruntled musings, and Ezra was briefly very glad that there was no-one out in the scrublands with him to witness the two-foot jump into the air it resulted in. He landed back on the ground, one hand darting quickly to his chest to put his goddamned heart back where it belonged, and then he was hustling up the slope in the right direction as quickly and silently as he could.
Not Nathan, he consoled himself. That had been a horse's scream, not a human's, and Nathan had left his horse back at the livery along with Ezra's. Neither of them had been that stupid, at least. Chances were, then, that somehow the vampires had manage to stumble across the one damned idiot in the territory who'd decided to take a midnight ride across their path. Damn it. So much for avoiding victims. Though, maybe it was only his baseline selfish nature resurfacing, but Ezra was still guiltily relieved that it was a stranger, not one of his own.
He reached the top of the small rise, dropping onto his haunches behind some scrub to get the lay of land. His gut clenched, a little, at the scene the light of the full moon revealed down in the little hollow beneath him. Not one horse. Three, all dead. Only one of 'em had had time to scream. The vampires had taken them out first, made sure their meals couldn't up and run on 'em. It always horrified Ezra, how much blood could come from a horse's body. How much of a mess dead horses could make.
And as for the humans who'd come with those horses ...
On the one hand, it looked to have been quick. These vampires, for whatever reason, didn't seem to be inclined to play with their food. On the other hand, though, that merciful neatness in itself meant that there was no chance of anyone being saved. They'd been dead before Ezra even topped the rise.
He closed his eyes for a second, wiping one hand shakily across his mouth. All that work, trying to avoid this. All of it for nothing. He didn't recognise them from this distance, if he'd ever known them. He could see they were all male, though. No women or children had died tonight, for whatever small comfort that was.
They had to die. The vampires. Right here and right now, those blasted things had to die, while they were still slow and sated from their meal. Three on one, but it wasn't like he planned on getting up close and personal. Silver bullets wouldn't kill a vampire the way they would a werewolf, but they would put it on the ground and in enough pain to allow someone to get close enough to use a stake. Manage to shoot them in the head, and you could nearly finish them at your leisure. Ezra had always been a good shot. Maybe not quite six-bullets-in-one-hole good, but near enough to count.
Before he could put that darkly satisfying thought into action, however, and purely because tonight was apparently a night for things not going to plan, another figure stood up into sight on the opposite rise and stalked slowly and grimly down into the moonlit hollow, a dully gleaming sword in one of his hands.
It would seem that Nathan Jackson had had a similar idea. Except without, apparently, the part about safely disabling them from a distance.
"Well well," said one of the females, smiling brightly as she dropped one of the bodies to face Nathan instead. The others fell in behind her, moving with slow, deliberate motions to exaggerate their menace. Odd. Ezra would've laid odds on the coachman being the leader. Though perhaps he shouldn't have. His own mother was proof enough of the deadlier of the species. "What have we here, then? Someone's mislaid herald?"
"You shouldn't have come here," Nathan told her softly. "You're not welcome."
He hadn't so much as flinched so far, his sword held casually out to one side. Ezra bit furiously at a knuckle to keep himself silent. Nathan had skill with a blade, of course, both he and Buck had found that out to their shock, but if the damned fool thought he could stand there and successfully threaten vampires with it ...
The leading lady laughed, high and tinkling and malicious, and the other two tittered coldly after her. She moved, drifting a foot or two closer to Nathan, only pausing when the sword twitched slightly. She shook her head. Her face was so pale it nearly glowed in the moonlight, and Ezra could see a deeply pitying expression come across it.
"Go back to your master, pet," she said dismissively, waving one elegant hand. "Tell him if he wishes to speak with us, he shouldn't send slaves next time."
Ezra automatically came half to his feet at that, his gun coming up entirely by instinct, knowing that, whatever else, Nathan would not react well to that. A second later, though, he froze without ever completing the motion, his hand half-raised and his mind entirely emptied in shock.
Nathan didn't raise his sword in answer, you see. No. Nathan looked at her, and bared his sudden fangs instead.
"Ain't got no master," he said, soft and more sibilant than before. He stalked forward, with a vampire's liquid gait, and met her inhuman eyes very coldly with his own. Ezra, above him, couldn't breathe all of a sudden. He didn't understand, and he couldn't remember how to breathe. "I killed him, you see. Not ten hours after I was made. And I'm greatly inclined to do the same to you, ma'am. I've not much fondness for the rest of my kind these days. Can't help but think they'd all be best off in graves they crawled out of. You understand that?"
She stared at him. Ezra distantly recognised the expression on her face, the sort of blank combination of affront and confusion and mislaid expectations. He'd seen it before. He'd worn it himself. Nathan ... Nathan never acted like you expected. Nathan never let you keep those neat little boxes in your head, the ones where you put people like him. There were no people like him. Ten minutes into knowing him, you had to realise that. Nathan wasn't anything you were raised to believe in.
If he had been, he'd have broken Ezra's fool arm that day in the Seminole village, and never looked back since.
"... You can't speak like that to me," the vampire managed at last, almost too distantly shocked to remember menace. Her brow clouded over a second later, though, a deep and ugly anger rising to the fore. Ezra recognised this, too. Not only from vampires. There'd been any number of ordinary men and women in the South who'd have reacted exactly the same way. "You disgusting little creature, how dare you talk to me like that!"
Nathan only raised his chin, stood straight and contemptuously tall in front of her, and hefted the weight of his blade casually in his hand. He looked at her a little sideways, an odd sort of smile on his face, and asked her gently:
"Want to see what else I dare, 'my lady'?"
She didn't answer. Not in words, at least. She simply flashed forwards with a scream of blind fury and swiped one hand at his head with the force of a cannonball. Nathan swept below it, with all a vampire's grace and speed, and pivoted to introduce his cavalry sabre to the back of her very lovely neck. That was the reason for the sword, of course. Decapitation, unlike silver, worked a treat on damn near anything. If you had the speed and the stamina to get that close, a sword most certainly ought to do the trick.
So long as your opponent was alone, at least. Before the blade could do more than bite at her shoulder, the second and third vampires closed behind him, snatching him away and yanking his sword arm out of the blow. Nathan didn't even snarl. He simply turned to follow their pull, added his momentum to their own, and swept the sword up and around to bury the blade about four inches deep into the male vampire's side. The coachman let go, a shocked, bubbling snarl escaping him, and nearly took Nathan's sword out of his hand as he fell. Nathan had to fight for a second not to lose it, the wounded vampire leaning weight on the blade with malice aforethought, and then the second woman shrieked in beside him and scored weeping lines down across Nathan's face and neck. Nathan staggered sideways a step, managed to free his sword at the same time, and backed up a little with the blade en garde to recover himself.
And as the three of them pulled themselves up to face him, blood and fury in the air around them, Ezra finally, finally, regained the use of his senses. Or close enough, anyway. Vampire or no vampire, the sight of Nathan's blood prompted an entirely instinctual response.
His first bullet caught the woman who'd wounded Nathan over the left ear, knocking her head sideways with its force. Not a killing blow, not on a vampire, but anyone who's blind and screaming from a burning bullet to the head tends not to be the same kind of threat anymore. He was already sliding downslope as the other two blurred from his sight, knowing that they'd be too fast to keep an eye on once startled. Nathan, almost as shocked as the others, struck the wailing vampire an almost casual blow across the neck to finish her off, before blurring out of sight himself as he chased the strongest of the pair, the unwounded leader.
At least, that's what Ezra guessed he was doing, if only because it's what he'd have done himself if he'd had the constitution for it.
For his own part, Ezra skidded on the landing into the floor of the hollow, skipping awkwardly over the corpse of one of the horses, and immediately darted in an ungainly sidestep towards the single rocky outcropping in the vicinity. He needed something solid at his back, and he needed it yesterday, if he was to have any hope of surviving this.
He didn't quite make it. He'd almost known he wouldn't. An arm came out of nowhere, catching him by the shoulder and spinning him to smash backwards into the rocks with all the force of a freight train going downhill. He cried out, he couldn't help it, and his gun tumbled out of his suddenly numb hand. The stench of blood, already powerful from the copious amount of it staining the dirt of this little killing field, swarmed up to nearly choke him. He knew, even before the stars cleared from his eyes, who'd caught him.
A wounded vampire needs blood to heal himself, after all. And only an idiot would send anything but their strongest against something like Nathan.
"Stupid hunter," the coachman hissed, his breath foetid and gore-smelling against Ezra's face. "You and your stupid slave. We're going to kill you."
Ezra would have rejoindered. Something about shooting first and spitting threats later, maybe. He was having more than enough trouble breathing as it was, however, and the sensation of teeth abruptly burying themselves in his neck did absolutely nothing to help matters. So he simply braced his legs instead, pressed his back further into the rock, and triggered the mechanism on his left arm to introduce his second nasty surprise to the proceedings. The spring-loaded stake shot into his hand and, without so much as a word, he drove it immediately upwards into the vampire's chest. His aim wasn't the best, but he managed to get it in beneath the ribs, and a twist of his body shoved it handily up into that lump the vampire called a heart.
The vampire disintegrated. There was no other word for it. Air and life escaped him in one furious, incontinent rush, the flesh withering and desiccating behind it. Ezra pushed upwards with the stake almost purely by instinct, levering the fangs out of his neck even as the body hissed back into itself around them, and then whole monstrosity crumbled all at once and shattered apart around the wood. A third of its original size, wholly unrecognisable as anything that had once been human, the remains of the vampire cracked into dust and left Ezra bleeding and barely conscious against his rock.
He dropped to his knees, his head spinning and his hand clenched convulsively around the stake. He hoped to God the third was already dead, because if anything more potent than a flea came against him right now, he was almost certainly a dead man. What the hell had he been thinking, come out here by himself? Shooting from a distance, a fine idea, except there were three of them and you could only shoot one before they knew enough to move. So fast. Why did he always forget how goddamned fast a vampire could be?
He heard a noise, a rush of air as something superhumanly fast came back into range, and then a crunch of dust and gravel as it came to a stop. He registered Nathan's voice, the cry of shock and concern. He really, genuinely did. He knew who'd arrived before he acted, but there was more than one instinct in motion here. He heard a vampire come back into range, and he'd triggered the second mechanism and had the derringer pointed Nathan's way before he'd so much as looked at the man. His hand shook around it, rather violently while he was still struggling for a breath, but Nathan had to have seen him fire it enough to freeze anyway. That, or Nathan just didn't want to startle him no more.
Ezra looked up at him. Kneeling in the dirt and the blood, the wounds on his neck dripping merrily away, Ezra looked up at the man he'd thought he knew and now had no idea anymore. Nathan stared down at him, over the quivering barrel of the little gun, blood on his shirt and his teeth still very much on display. Took a while to bring 'em back down after feeding, maybe. Especially when the vampire was wounded too. Took a while, Ezra thought, to be able to put your teeth away.
"Ezra," Nathan said softly. Not a command. Not even a plea. Just an acknowledgement, maybe. Just remindin' Ezra that they knew each other. Well though. That was easy enough for him to say.
"... It doesn't make sense," he managed, his voice hoarse and broken and angry. He could hear it, though he hadn't the strength to change it. He looked up at Nathan, all his confusion and his fury defiantly plain to see. "You can't be ... I would have known. Damn it, Nathan. I'd have known. I'd have to."
Nathan made to move, held out his hand as though to reach towards him, and Ezra had snapped the gun up between them before he'd even thought. Nathan froze, and Ezra shook his head, biting his lip against the sudden pain in his neck.
"I loaded 'em both," he rasped viciously. "Silver, Nathan. I loaded 'em all before I came. Kindly don't come closer, please. Not just yet."
"I'm not gonna hurt you," Nathan said, tired and angry and a little fierce himself. "Damn it, Ezra, when have I ever hurt you? You think I didn't know what you were? I saw that stake of yours when JD arrested you the first time. I've known from the start you were a hunter. You think if I was gonna hurt you I wouldn't have done it then?"
... Known from the start. But of course he would have. That'd been part of the reason Ezra'd stopped carrying his arsenal around here, the odd looks he'd gotten when the Judge had locked him up that time. He'd wanted them not to think he was crazy, carrying sharpened bits of wood around on a spring. Nathan ... Nathan was a vampire, though. Nathan'd known then and there what they had to mean. And Nathan ...
He'd not hurt him. Not for being a coward and a bigoted ass in the Seminole village, not for being a hunter in Four Corners. Not once, not ever, and had their positions been reversed Ezra was far from sure he'd have been as forbearing.
But still. Still. Nathan was a vampire. That was ... That didn't make sense, and until it did, until it could, Ezra was keeping a silver bullet nice and ready, thank you very much.
"How are you feeding?" he asked, jabbing the derringer angrily in Nathan's direction. "How are you hiding, Nathan? Where the hell have you been getting ..." A horrible thought occurred. "Oh. But you're a healer, aren't you. I don't remember anyone dying, though. If you were using your patients for that--"
"For God's sake," Nathan spat. He didn't come towards Ezra, though. He took a step back instead, almost stumbled it, and when Ezra managed to look up and focus on him, it wasn't so much anger as utter, sickened horror on his face. Nathan shook his head blankly, staring down at Ezra, and it didn't take Maude Standish's son to see the flat denial there. "For god's sake, Ezra. You think I ... you think I could? You think I could do that to folks?"
No. If you'd asked him even a day ago, Ezra would have answered a very clear and concrete no to that question. Nathan was ... Nathan was Nathan. As truly close to a good and honest man as a crook like Ezra had ever seen, and all the more painful, the more reassuring, for that.
But that Nathan wasn't real. That Nathan had been lying to him, lying to him so goddamned well that Ezra hadn't even seen it happening, so well that it took fangs and a full-blown vampiric battle before Ezra even realised a lie was possible from him. Even more than the fact of the vampire itself, even more than knowing what Nathan was, that was what tormented him. He'd known those three monsters for what they were the second they'd stepped off the stage. How the hell had he never seen Nathan for what he was?
He had to know. More than anything in his life, Ezra had to know that, even if Nathan up and killed him for it straight afterwards. He needed to know how, and to know why, and in hopes of getting an answer he let the hand with the derringer sink slowly and exhaustedly towards the ground. He took his weapon off Nathan, let it fall to the ground beside him, and simply stared up at this man he'd thought had been his friend.
"How are you doin' this?" he asked, more tiredly now than angrily. "I should have known, Nathan. How did you hide it from me? How do you hide something that big?"
Nathan didn't answer. Not for a second. He just looked down at Ezra, about as tired and as wounded as Ezra himself, and then he looked away, cast his eyes up to the moon and the sky as if he could find some answers there. He brought a hand up, scrubbed it helplessly through short-cropped hair, and dropped stiffly down onto his haunches in front of Ezra. He spread his hands, the wounds on his face and neck splitting a little bit as he shrugged.
"I don't know," he said softly. "Honestly, Ezra, I don't know. I mean, I wasn't going to tell you about it. You're a hunter, and I'm not lookin' to get myself shot. I've enough people wanting to string me up just for the bits they can see, I wasn't going to give anyone anything more if I could help it. I don't think I was ever planning on telling you. I don't know why you never saw it, though. Especially today, when I saw you figure those three out the second you saw 'em. I don't know why you looked at me, and didn't see."
Ezra closed his eyes. He shouldn't have. Any other vampire, he wouldn't even have thought it. This was Nathan, though. Even still, even after everything tonight, there was some part of him that couldn't feel threatened by the man. Not like that. There was some part of him, even now, that just honestly didn't think that Nathan would hurt him.
"At first," Nathan went on, still over there, still not taking advantage of the opening Ezra had left him. "At first I thought it was because you'd seen me first in daylight. A lot of people think we can't go out in it, though I'd have thought you wouldn't have lasted long as hunter if you'd really believed that. We're mostly human during the day, no fancy stuff, but a human can still kill you good and proper if you're not expecting him."
Ezra snorted exhausted agreement. Didn't they all of them know that full well. He thought he sensed a little answering smile, too. Though that could have been the blood loss. The wound hadn't actually gone too deep, the stake had been introduced too early and too decisively for that, but the steady trickle from it was maybe starting to be a problem regardless. Almost absently, he reached up to press his hand there, and sensed Nathan's suppressed motion of concern. Ezra opened his eyes blearily, just to look at him. He sat down sideways off his knees, let himself slump into the rock behind him, and this time he saw as well as sensed the open concern in the other man's face. Still Nathan. Goddamnit. Human or vampire, no matter what, the man was still Nathan.
"... After a while, I knew it wasn't that," the healer went on, after a long second. "You're too careful for that. And I remember our first meeting, Ezra. I know you better now, I know that's far from all you are, but I still remember it. I wonder sometimes ... You ever think that maybe you didn't see the vampire because you were too caught up with what else I am?" He gestured towards himself. His face. His skin. "Like the lady said earlier, Ezra. Vampires are the masters, not the slaves. Folks like me ... maybe you reckoned instinctively that folks like me didn't count."
Ezra looked away, hard and sharp, and felt that sour sensation in his stomach that had become so far very familiar these last few months. Shame, hot and hateful, and the awakening of a conscience he'd thought for so long was lost beyond recovery. Had hoped was beyond recovery. Life had been so much simpler without it.
"... It was my master, you know," Nathan went on softly. Gently, and absolutely without pity. "They weren't wrong there. I didn't want this, Ezra. I didn't get a choice. He turned me so he'd have a better plaything, and I killed him for it, but what's done is done. I couldn't go back afterwards. I could escape him, but not what he'd made of me. I never wanted to be a monster."
"Nathan ..." Ezra tried, his slack hand slipping away from his neck. Nathan caught it. He'd leaned in, knelt forward with that speed and that grace again, and caught Ezra's hand to press it back and stem the blood once more. Only a bare trickle now. It was slowing in good time. Only a small wound, after all.
"I don't need human blood often," Nathan said earnestly. "I'm not stealin' from people, Ezra. It's a demon, this thing inside me, it'll take any old blood sacrifice. I get paid in chickens half the time as it stands, and I'm a better hunter than most of you give me credit for. I don't need to hurt anyone. The ones that do, the ones like those three you helped me kill, they do it because they want to. Because they like it. I'm not ... God, Ezra. I'm not that. Not anymore. I never want to become that again."
Ezra blinked a little at that. He stirred, waking himself from the dual lethargy of pain and exhaustion, and squinted at Nathan more curiously. "Again?" he asked, prodding gently, and Nathan's hand tightened around his own. Nathan flinched, and looked away in some shame of his own.
"You were in the war," the ex-slave said quietly. Almost an explanation in and of itself. "I was angry, Ezra. I was so angry. They made a monster out of me, and I wanted to show it to them. I wanted them to reap what they sowed, and I wanted them to put me down when it was done. I don't pretend I was anything less than monstrous then."
Ezra nodded carefully, around the hands still pressed against his neck. "I know," he said. "I saw it. Not you. You weren't the only one with that idea, on either side. I'd only heard stories before then. My mother trained me, because she'd tried to seduce the wrong man of wealth and wound up half-dead because of it, but I hadn't seen. Not until then. Bloodbaths tend to draw out all the monsters, it seems. Human or otherwise."
"... Yes," Nathan said, and he drew away from Ezra now. He sat back up on his haunches and gave Ezra room to breathe. "I met one myself. Confederate. He was the second one of my kind that I killed."
Ezra blinked at him, and offered perhaps the smallest of smiles. "So was mine," he said, not without some humour. Such strange and terrible things they were turning out to have in common tonight. "Confederate, that is. My commanding officer, as it happened. It's fortunate that battlefields are such confusing places, or I'd probably have been shot for that. There are some things a man finds it hard to serve under, though."
Nathan blinked at him. He didn't know what to do with that, Ezra thought. Fair enough. Ezra wasn't particularly sure what he'd meant to be done with it either. He shook his head, and changed the topic slightly once again.
"You wanted to be put down," he said, slowly and carefully, watching Nathan's face. "That didn't happen, obviously. What changed?"
Nathan blinked again, and then smiled a little bit. Happier, more hopeful, if still slightly shamed. Maybe it made Ezra a horrible person, maybe it was that selfish streak of his again, but he found that little thread of shame almost reassuring.
"What I told y'all," Nathan said, with that small little grin. "I was stretcher-bearer, in between the bloody bits. Vampires, you get a nose for the blood, the heart, for when a person's too far gone to come back. I had a talent for finding those who could still be saved. The doctor who trained me, he figured out what I was. He told me I could keep on that road if I wanted. There were enough people around us trying to kill or be killed. Or, he said, I could do something else. Be something else. Put people back together instead of take them apart, heal them instead of preying on them. He said if I really wanted to have revenge on the thing that did this to me, then that would be the way to do it." He grinned, shrugged. His own wounds had dried up, Ezra noticed, even if they hadn't closed. "I thought he might be right. So I gave it a try."
"And succeeded," Ezra noted, carefully levering himself back to his feet at last. Nathan blinked up at him, and Ezra ... Ezra held out a hand to him, after a second. Ezra offered him a hand up, and kept hold of it gently when Nathan stood beside him. "Your skin might have been one reason I never saw you, Nathan," he told the man quietly. "I admit that. But the other one is that you just don't act like a vampire. Not like any one I've ever met. Nobody dies around you. Nobody bleeds if you can help it. Hell, right this minute I'm not bleedin' anymore because of you. It doesn't exactly make folks think 'vampire' when they look at you, you know?"
Nathan ducked his head, not quite smiling and not quite not. He looked down at their joined hands. There was blood in the creases of Ezra's skin, dark against the pale of it. It didn't show up so well against Nathan's, though they both knew it was still there. They'd both done some bleeding tonight, in more senses than one. They'd both done something else, too.
They'd destroyed some monsters together. Even without knowing they could trust each other, they'd still fought together, and they'd still won. Like the Seminole village all over again.
"You're not much of a hunter to look at either, you know," Nathan commented, somewhat teasingly. "Hunters usually have more sense than to go wandering out into the dark alone after three damned vampires. Damn it, Ezra, do you know how easily you could have been killed?"
Ezra coughed, wincing at the pain still clinging to his neck, and raising a pointed eyebrow because of it. "I may have figured it out," he said wryly, but gripped Nathan's hand in turn, pointing at the rakes across his face with the other hand. "You didn't look to be doing so well yourself. Though the swordsmanship was beautiful, I have to say. You move like water or something. It's really rather unfair."
Nathan opened his mouth. Closed it again after a second. He shook his helplessly, and looked back at Ezra once again.
"I don't even know how to answer that right now," he admitted, reaching up to scrub at his face and wincing as it pulled at his wounds. "Oh, blast it. We've got to get cleaned up. We've got to get this cleaned up. Those poor people, whoever they were. We've got to find an explanation for being out here, for where those three off the stagecoach ended up ..."
"We say we don't know," Ezra interrupted firmly. "We saw the coachman heading out this way, followed him because we're civic-minded like that. We lost him in the dark, and then we stumbled across this lot a little later. Someone or something came at us, scratched you up and maybe got a shot off at my neck. We don't know who or what it was, and we never did find that coachman. We'd have raised the alarm, but we had to limp home first, and in our current conditions nobody's gonna be surprised that took us a while. Anything else, any little details, we can figure out on the spot, and if push comes to shove we can try to tell the truth. Only if push comes to shove. Barring that Vin finds something funny in the tracks around here, most of that should hold up okay."
Nathan stared at him. "You," he started, shaking his head. "You come with these things on the spot. I've never figured it out. You lie like a goddamned rug, Ezra."
Ezra flashed him a grin, quite bright in the moonlight. "Conman, remember?" he pointed out. "I may not be that much of a hunter, but I am a damned fine cheat and a liar. The two go together rather better than you might first suspect." He paused, and then decided to chance it. "Besides. For a man who's been hiding his true nature from damn near everyone, I'd say you're not so bad a conman yourself, Mr Jackson. Speaking as one professional to another."
For a second, it looked like a step too far. It looked like that accusation, as teasingly meant as it was, might test their tentative truce just a little too much. Nathan didn't like lies. Even living one, he didn't like them, and he didn't like to be accused of them either, however accurately. And yet. After a moment, one very fraught moment in which Ezra was abruptly reminded that he was holding a vampire's hand, Nathan's expression relaxed once more, and the man even chanced smiling at him.
"I doubt I'm yet in your league, Ezra," he said softly. "I concede the point, however, since right now I can hardly deny it. We'll both by lying through our teeth before the day is through, and I guess I might as well get used to the idea."
Ezra snorted softly. "It was nicer when the damned things didn't wander through, wasn't it?" he asked wryly. "Nearly a whole year without a fuss, and then three vampires happen and everything's up in the air again. Damned nuisance, I call it. Most inconsiderate of them."
Nathan stared at him for a second, with the most complicated expression Ezra'd ever seen on that face, and then, almost abruptly, the man tugged him close with their joined hands and reached out to cup the back of Ezra's skull. Ezra had half a second to be startled by this, to worry about it, and then Nathan had tugged their foreheads very gently together, reeling Ezra in until they could just about rest against each other. His hands weren't cold, Ezra noticed. He didn't know why he hadn't thought it before. For a vampire, Nathan's skin wasn't really the deathly cold so many described.
"I'm glad you're here," the man whispered softly, leaning against him. "If you'd told me when we met that one day I'd end up saying that, I'd have called you a liar. But I'm glad you're here, Ezra. I'm glad you're one of mine."
And Ezra might have protested that, the possessive part, he might have denied it, but he was remembering hearing a horse's scream, and how stupidly glad he'd been to know that meant it wasn't Nathan. How relieved he'd felt, to know the dead were none of his.
"... Likewise, Mr Jackson," was all he said, and counted it good enough to be going on with.
A/N: I apologise for any mistakes. This one all came out in a big long rush, and I'm too tired to try and fix it. I mostly just wanted vampire!Nathan all of a sudden. Um. My apologies?
Four Corners drew its fair share of trouble. Since they'd set up shop as the Seven, maybe more than its fair share. Bank robbers, cattle barons, outlaw gangs, travelling murderers, they all seemed inexplicably drawn to the place. You'd be forgiven for thinking that there wasn't a single manner of monster that their little hamlet hadn't seen.
Any manner of human monster, that is. There were more than humans out here in the wilds of the west, however. In hindsight, Ezra thought, you'd think he'd have noticed their dearth in Four Corners before a bunch of them rode in to remind him.
They came in on the evening stage. It was still daylight out. The sun wouldn't go down for another couple of hours yet. Ezra knew that wasn't necessarily the impediment to their kind that many thought it was, however. And he knew, as soon as he set eyes on them, that these creatures were most definitely of a kind, and that kind was most definitely far from human. His cards fell still in his hands as he watched them step down off the coach, cold-eyed and cat-footed and slightly too graceful to be human, for all their otherwise masterful pretence at it.
Vampires. Three of 'em. The two passengers and the coachman. They were undead, every last one of them.
He looked away. Casually, of course, so as not to draw their attention, or indeed anyone else's. Never let the enemy know you recognise 'em. Vampires had enough advantages without a heads up on top of it, and crying out "Vampires! They're all vampires!" was a good way to get yourself run out of town as a crazy man. So he looked away, an idle scan of the street before he looked back at the cards in his hands, just as a ruse.
As he did so, though, he caught sight of someone else watching the newcomers. He caught Nathan's eyes across the street, the healer standing on the opposite boardwalk, and he saw in them the same recognition that anyone who knew to look would see in his own.
Nathan looked away first, as casual as Ezra had intended to be, and headed calmly back to his surgery. For his own part, Ezra couldn't quite help the slow blink of surprise, though he at least managed not to be looking at the vampires while he did it. Nathan? Of all people to know a vampire on sight ... Though, actually, Ezra supposed it might make sense. A healer ran across all sorts of injuries, from all sorts of causes, and Nathan had served in the Late Unpleasantness as well. There'd been more than a few blood suckers plying those battlefields, on either side. Ezra knew that for a fact. Maybe it did make a certain amount of sense.
Not the point right now, however. The point now was the three vamps who'd set down in their previously unblighted little town, and what the hell to do about them.
He swept up his cards and riffled them pointedly back into their deck while he thought about it. Buck glanced up beside him, briefly distracted from his admiring study of the ... Damn it. His study of two female vampires, so nicely disguised as beautiful young women, new to the town, tired from their journey, and maybe in need of a friendly gesture or two. Dang and blast it. Well, before anything else, Ezra would have to put a spoke in that wheel, wouldn't he?
"I wouldn't, if I were you," he said mildly, straightening his sleeve cuff and contriving to look unaffected. Buck frowned, glancing back over to where the creatures were fanning themselves in the evening sunshine, listening carefully to whatever the vampire disguised as the coachman was saying. It was a lovely pantomime, Ezra did admit. It was calculated perfectly to draw just the right kind of eyes, such those in the head of the man beside him.
"Why not?" Buck asked, smiling wistfully when they glanced his way and wiggling his fingers in a delighted little wave. "They look mighty fine to me. Just two pretty darlin's in need of a friendly face, and I'm thinking mine might just fit the bill."
Ezra didn't snort. Now was not the time to put the man's back up. He couldn't quite resist a wry grimace, though.
"Well, all right," he said, with careful disaffection as he shuffled the cards from one hand to the other. "If you want to end up with something important shrivelled inside your trousers, you go right ahead. Don't say I didn't warn you, though."
"What?!" Buck yelped, his head snapping around and both hands dropping into his lap right on cue. He stared wild-eyed at Ezra, and Ezra most definitely did not smirk. It took all of his considerable training to manage it, but he did not snicker at the man.
"I happen to recognise the lady on the left, that's all," he said, as calm as if they were having the most normal of conversations. "One of my mother's younger acquaintances, I believe. She has a most wonderful little powder that renders a man ... impotent, shall we say. Young ladies travelling alone need all the protection they can get, after all. I'm told she takes a particular satisfaction in slipping it to gentlemen she considers forward. Not that you could be considered that, my friend, gracious no, but like so many of us, I fear the lady might be inclined to, perhaps, shoot first and ask questions later? Of course, if you wish to risk it regardless ..."
"No, ah," Buck started, stammering slightly. He waved his hands in flustered dismissal, sneaking an alarmed glance back at the ladies in question. Who were, Ezra noted in some dismay, now frowning at them a little bit. "A man shouldn't bother a lady if she doesn't want to be bothered. I'm sure if she's interested, she'll let me know in her own time."
... Yes, she probably would, Ezra thought. Which was another worry, now that they'd seen that Buck was their kind of prey, but at least the great lug was unlikely to go wandering into the line of fire on his own recognisance now. There was only so much a man could do, and Ezra needed some time to think before he could do anything overt here. It would have to do for now.
Leaving Buck to his own devices for the moment, to nurse his drink and sneak alarmed glances at the ladies, Ezra moved to the table at the edge of the saloon's boardwalk and dealt himself out a hand of solitaire. Chances were reasonably high that the vampires would avail of either the saloon or the restaurant as part of their human guise, since every human who'd ever stepped off a stagecoach gravitated towards the nearest source of refreshment, and he wanted to be out of their direct path if they happened this way. Moving off would draw attention to himself, more than Buck's yelp already had, and besides, he needed to be close enough to see what they were doing. Whatever was going on here, and whatever he was going to end up having to do about it, he was going to need to keep an eye on them first.
Hah! What he was going to have to do? Ezra nearly shook his head at the thought. He damn well hoped he wouldn't have to do anything. Only an idiot went up against vampires if he could at all help it, and this was not what he'd signed on here to have to deal with. There hadn't been so much as a scent of the unnatural since he'd been here. He'd almost gotten to hoping that he might be safe. More damned fool he.
The question now, of course, was how much of a threat these vampires were, and in what manner they planned to leverage it. Even vampires wouldn't be so foolish as to openly injure a town of this size and, shall we say, reactionary nature. No. They'd plan for something more subtle, something that got them their meals with as little fuss as possible. They'd come here in the guise of a stagecoach, and that had to be for a reason. If they were a real coach, and intending to run through the night, they'd have a quick stop-off here for refreshment and to pick up new passengers before heading on. It was reasonably likely, then, that they intended to do just that. Only in this case, the passengers would shortly find themselves as the refreshment, as soon as the coach was far enough back out that nobody would hear the screams.
Rather shamefully, watching as the vampires finally sashayed past Buck into the shade of the saloon, Ezra found himself hoping that that was indeed what they planned. Especially since the other option was that they intended to spend the night here. If they merely picked up some victims and left again, then he wouldn't necessarily have to do anything about it. If they spent the night in the town, then somebody would be dead or wounded before morning, and Ezra would have to deal with it.
More dangerously, he might have to explain it, and never in his life had he ever seen that end well. People did not look kindly on a madman yammering on about monsters of the night while the blood of two young women lay on his hands. That kind of thing lead to a rope around the neck. While Ezra might chance telling the other members of the group if he absolutely had to, especially if Nathan knew as much as he suddenly seemed to and could therefore back him up, it was still a far, far greater risk than he preferred to have to take, and there was no way in hell he was getting himself into a position where he'd have to explain to the townsfolk.
No. Better for everyone if the creatures intended to lure themselves some passengers and move on to eat them at their leisure. It would be very unfortunate for the passengers in question, of course, but it would mean that the whole thing was more or less not his problem. There was no-one in town due for a trip elsewhere at present, meaning that any prospective victims would be strangers to him, and thus not his responsibility. Stage travel was risky. Everyone knew that. You made your own way, and you accepted your own consequences. In all likelihood, that was why the vampires had set up as a stage in the first place. People all too often didn't look for missing travellers, especially if they were strangers to those around them. That was just the way of the world. Whoever got in that coach, whoever these vampires took, they wouldn't be Ezra's friends. They wouldn't ... they wouldn't be his concern ...
Goddamnit. Even as he thought it, Ezra knew that it wasn't true. He felt his stomach sour within him, recognised guilt when he felt it. He shoved his chair back from the table and dropped his head back against the clapboard wall of the saloon. Buck looked him askance, but Ezra wasn't in the mood to care about that. Not when he had bigger problems. Those three creatures in the saloon behind him were his concern, and he damn well knew it.
They wouldn't have been. Once upon a time, even as little as a few months ago, he could have happily let whoever wanted to climb in that coach and ride off to be eaten, just so long as it wasn't him. Well, not happily, but he could have let them. He was not in the habit of public service. All the training his mother had given him had been for self-defence purposes only, when people like them made such very attractive targets to the monsters of the world. Who would miss an itinerant gambler if he disappeared? No-one, that's who, and so Ezra missed no-one else either. Everyone took their own chances, and everyone accepted their own consequences. That was how the world worked.
Not anymore. Not from the moment he'd tried to ride out of an Indian village under siege, and found that he couldn't manage it. Every moment since then had only hammered the change home. He couldn't leave it. Not anymore. He damn well couldn't pretend.
He sighed, sitting forward again to rub his face with his palm. Damn it. He wasn't even a proper hunter. He was a gambler who'd learned a trick or two in the interests of saving his own neck, and who so far had managed not to get himself exsanguinated for his troubles. If he picked up a stick and started poking a hornet's nest now, that was pretty likely to change. There was just no help for it, though.
First things first. He had to disable the coach, keep the vampires here. Counter-intuitive, maybe, when he could not under any circumstances let anyone else in the town know what they were or what he planned to do about it. Explanations, in this instance, were absolutely no-one's friend. But if the vampires managed to lure anyone into the coach and make it out of town with them, chances were good that whoever they were would be very, very dead by the time Ezra caught up with them, and that was rather the opposite of the point of this little venture. He'd figure out how to lure the creatures out of town sans victims later on. For now, he just had to make sure that the coach stayed right where it currently was.
Fortunately, that was something he'd had a great deal more experience with of late.
Damn it, Ezra thought, trailing after three all-but-flying vampires as they flitted away from the town. Damn it, he was just not cut out for this sort of thing! You'd think he'd have learned by now that heroics were for other people. They never worked out the way he wanted them to.
On the one hand, several parts of the plan, such as it was, had in fact gone as they were supposed to. A little surreptitious sabotage of the coach's under-straps and the left wheel rim, and according to a bewildered Yosemite it wouldn't be going anywhere until tomorrow afternoon at the earliest. There had been an ugly moment there where Ezra thought the coachman vampire had been about to take issue with the blacksmith over this, but one of the ladies prevailed on his finer, or at least more discreet, instincts. The vampires had been neatly snared in the town, and no-one any the wiser.
He'd also been able to get himself kitted out in reasonable order. He'd taken to not wearing the better part of his non-human arsenal since he'd come here, another sign of how life in this town was letting his standards slowly but surely slip away. His mother might have a point there. He'd had to take a few minutes to slip up to his room and fetch out the correct ammunition and sundry other items. Time was, he'd have had at least two nasty surprises on him at all times. He'd let himself get sloppy, he thought. He'd let himself feel safe, and when had that ever ended well for him? He shouldn't have needed a sudden vampire to point that out.
He had, however, managed to get himself outfitted any number of hours before their visitors were familiar enough with the town to consider seeking out their evening repast. He'd figured they'd leave it late, into the morning hours. It only made sense, for them to slip someone or someones unseen, get them out of town for the main event, and slip back closer to dawn. If they timed it right, picked the right victims, they'd have been long gone on the coach the next day before anyone even noticed. A stranger to the town would be first choice. Someone nobody would miss. There weren't that many in Four Corners right now, and Ezra had arranged by dint of a word or two and a well-timed bar brawl to have all of them under somebody's watch. That way, the creatures would have to look further afield for victims, one of the outlying homesteads, and that gave him time and space enough to catch up with them outside town.
That had been the plan, anyway. And it hadn't exactly gone wrong. The vampires had done exactly what he'd expected them to do, and so far they hadn't managed to catch anyone, though at the pace they were moving he was somewhat worried that they'd reach someone before he could catch up. Horses were too damn loud to go hunting with, and on foot he was having some problems.
That wasn't the real worry, though. They were heading out towards the Wells place, and Ezra had every confidence that Nettie Wells was both superstitious and belligerent enough to stay behind her threshold and put a shotgun shell in the first face as bothered her. Even a vampire would be temporarily discommoded by that. No, what worried Ezra was the knowledge of who else was out here ahead of him, probably on the same damned fool's errand, and with who knew what kind of experience to back him up.
Damned idiot healer. What the hell had Nathan been thinking, haring off after three vampires by himself? The surgery had been completely empty when Ezra had swung by, dark and silent as a grave. Not that Ezra had been thinking along those lines, no sir. Damn it. He didn't know what he'd expected Nathan to do when he'd gone there, he didn't even know what he'd wanted the man to do. He'd just thought, given that Nathan had had that look in his eyes earlier, given that Nathan had recognised what the creatures were, that Ezra had better at least check up on him before he headed out. Maybe ask for help. Hell, he didn't know himself, and the point had been rendered rather moot when he'd discovered the place empty and Nathan presumably out in the dark somewhere hunting vampires.
There'd been no point looking for him. The only thing Ezra'd been able to do was circle back to the vampires themselves, follow them out, and hope to God that he caught up to them before they stumbled over Nathan.
The problem with heroic plans that you couldn't tell anyone about, he decided grimly, was that nobody else knew enough to just sit still and cooperate with them.
A bloodcurdling scream chose that moment to interrupt his disgruntled musings, and Ezra was briefly very glad that there was no-one out in the scrublands with him to witness the two-foot jump into the air it resulted in. He landed back on the ground, one hand darting quickly to his chest to put his goddamned heart back where it belonged, and then he was hustling up the slope in the right direction as quickly and silently as he could.
Not Nathan, he consoled himself. That had been a horse's scream, not a human's, and Nathan had left his horse back at the livery along with Ezra's. Neither of them had been that stupid, at least. Chances were, then, that somehow the vampires had manage to stumble across the one damned idiot in the territory who'd decided to take a midnight ride across their path. Damn it. So much for avoiding victims. Though, maybe it was only his baseline selfish nature resurfacing, but Ezra was still guiltily relieved that it was a stranger, not one of his own.
He reached the top of the small rise, dropping onto his haunches behind some scrub to get the lay of land. His gut clenched, a little, at the scene the light of the full moon revealed down in the little hollow beneath him. Not one horse. Three, all dead. Only one of 'em had had time to scream. The vampires had taken them out first, made sure their meals couldn't up and run on 'em. It always horrified Ezra, how much blood could come from a horse's body. How much of a mess dead horses could make.
And as for the humans who'd come with those horses ...
On the one hand, it looked to have been quick. These vampires, for whatever reason, didn't seem to be inclined to play with their food. On the other hand, though, that merciful neatness in itself meant that there was no chance of anyone being saved. They'd been dead before Ezra even topped the rise.
He closed his eyes for a second, wiping one hand shakily across his mouth. All that work, trying to avoid this. All of it for nothing. He didn't recognise them from this distance, if he'd ever known them. He could see they were all male, though. No women or children had died tonight, for whatever small comfort that was.
They had to die. The vampires. Right here and right now, those blasted things had to die, while they were still slow and sated from their meal. Three on one, but it wasn't like he planned on getting up close and personal. Silver bullets wouldn't kill a vampire the way they would a werewolf, but they would put it on the ground and in enough pain to allow someone to get close enough to use a stake. Manage to shoot them in the head, and you could nearly finish them at your leisure. Ezra had always been a good shot. Maybe not quite six-bullets-in-one-hole good, but near enough to count.
Before he could put that darkly satisfying thought into action, however, and purely because tonight was apparently a night for things not going to plan, another figure stood up into sight on the opposite rise and stalked slowly and grimly down into the moonlit hollow, a dully gleaming sword in one of his hands.
It would seem that Nathan Jackson had had a similar idea. Except without, apparently, the part about safely disabling them from a distance.
"Well well," said one of the females, smiling brightly as she dropped one of the bodies to face Nathan instead. The others fell in behind her, moving with slow, deliberate motions to exaggerate their menace. Odd. Ezra would've laid odds on the coachman being the leader. Though perhaps he shouldn't have. His own mother was proof enough of the deadlier of the species. "What have we here, then? Someone's mislaid herald?"
"You shouldn't have come here," Nathan told her softly. "You're not welcome."
He hadn't so much as flinched so far, his sword held casually out to one side. Ezra bit furiously at a knuckle to keep himself silent. Nathan had skill with a blade, of course, both he and Buck had found that out to their shock, but if the damned fool thought he could stand there and successfully threaten vampires with it ...
The leading lady laughed, high and tinkling and malicious, and the other two tittered coldly after her. She moved, drifting a foot or two closer to Nathan, only pausing when the sword twitched slightly. She shook her head. Her face was so pale it nearly glowed in the moonlight, and Ezra could see a deeply pitying expression come across it.
"Go back to your master, pet," she said dismissively, waving one elegant hand. "Tell him if he wishes to speak with us, he shouldn't send slaves next time."
Ezra automatically came half to his feet at that, his gun coming up entirely by instinct, knowing that, whatever else, Nathan would not react well to that. A second later, though, he froze without ever completing the motion, his hand half-raised and his mind entirely emptied in shock.
Nathan didn't raise his sword in answer, you see. No. Nathan looked at her, and bared his sudden fangs instead.
"Ain't got no master," he said, soft and more sibilant than before. He stalked forward, with a vampire's liquid gait, and met her inhuman eyes very coldly with his own. Ezra, above him, couldn't breathe all of a sudden. He didn't understand, and he couldn't remember how to breathe. "I killed him, you see. Not ten hours after I was made. And I'm greatly inclined to do the same to you, ma'am. I've not much fondness for the rest of my kind these days. Can't help but think they'd all be best off in graves they crawled out of. You understand that?"
She stared at him. Ezra distantly recognised the expression on her face, the sort of blank combination of affront and confusion and mislaid expectations. He'd seen it before. He'd worn it himself. Nathan ... Nathan never acted like you expected. Nathan never let you keep those neat little boxes in your head, the ones where you put people like him. There were no people like him. Ten minutes into knowing him, you had to realise that. Nathan wasn't anything you were raised to believe in.
If he had been, he'd have broken Ezra's fool arm that day in the Seminole village, and never looked back since.
"... You can't speak like that to me," the vampire managed at last, almost too distantly shocked to remember menace. Her brow clouded over a second later, though, a deep and ugly anger rising to the fore. Ezra recognised this, too. Not only from vampires. There'd been any number of ordinary men and women in the South who'd have reacted exactly the same way. "You disgusting little creature, how dare you talk to me like that!"
Nathan only raised his chin, stood straight and contemptuously tall in front of her, and hefted the weight of his blade casually in his hand. He looked at her a little sideways, an odd sort of smile on his face, and asked her gently:
"Want to see what else I dare, 'my lady'?"
She didn't answer. Not in words, at least. She simply flashed forwards with a scream of blind fury and swiped one hand at his head with the force of a cannonball. Nathan swept below it, with all a vampire's grace and speed, and pivoted to introduce his cavalry sabre to the back of her very lovely neck. That was the reason for the sword, of course. Decapitation, unlike silver, worked a treat on damn near anything. If you had the speed and the stamina to get that close, a sword most certainly ought to do the trick.
So long as your opponent was alone, at least. Before the blade could do more than bite at her shoulder, the second and third vampires closed behind him, snatching him away and yanking his sword arm out of the blow. Nathan didn't even snarl. He simply turned to follow their pull, added his momentum to their own, and swept the sword up and around to bury the blade about four inches deep into the male vampire's side. The coachman let go, a shocked, bubbling snarl escaping him, and nearly took Nathan's sword out of his hand as he fell. Nathan had to fight for a second not to lose it, the wounded vampire leaning weight on the blade with malice aforethought, and then the second woman shrieked in beside him and scored weeping lines down across Nathan's face and neck. Nathan staggered sideways a step, managed to free his sword at the same time, and backed up a little with the blade en garde to recover himself.
And as the three of them pulled themselves up to face him, blood and fury in the air around them, Ezra finally, finally, regained the use of his senses. Or close enough, anyway. Vampire or no vampire, the sight of Nathan's blood prompted an entirely instinctual response.
His first bullet caught the woman who'd wounded Nathan over the left ear, knocking her head sideways with its force. Not a killing blow, not on a vampire, but anyone who's blind and screaming from a burning bullet to the head tends not to be the same kind of threat anymore. He was already sliding downslope as the other two blurred from his sight, knowing that they'd be too fast to keep an eye on once startled. Nathan, almost as shocked as the others, struck the wailing vampire an almost casual blow across the neck to finish her off, before blurring out of sight himself as he chased the strongest of the pair, the unwounded leader.
At least, that's what Ezra guessed he was doing, if only because it's what he'd have done himself if he'd had the constitution for it.
For his own part, Ezra skidded on the landing into the floor of the hollow, skipping awkwardly over the corpse of one of the horses, and immediately darted in an ungainly sidestep towards the single rocky outcropping in the vicinity. He needed something solid at his back, and he needed it yesterday, if he was to have any hope of surviving this.
He didn't quite make it. He'd almost known he wouldn't. An arm came out of nowhere, catching him by the shoulder and spinning him to smash backwards into the rocks with all the force of a freight train going downhill. He cried out, he couldn't help it, and his gun tumbled out of his suddenly numb hand. The stench of blood, already powerful from the copious amount of it staining the dirt of this little killing field, swarmed up to nearly choke him. He knew, even before the stars cleared from his eyes, who'd caught him.
A wounded vampire needs blood to heal himself, after all. And only an idiot would send anything but their strongest against something like Nathan.
"Stupid hunter," the coachman hissed, his breath foetid and gore-smelling against Ezra's face. "You and your stupid slave. We're going to kill you."
Ezra would have rejoindered. Something about shooting first and spitting threats later, maybe. He was having more than enough trouble breathing as it was, however, and the sensation of teeth abruptly burying themselves in his neck did absolutely nothing to help matters. So he simply braced his legs instead, pressed his back further into the rock, and triggered the mechanism on his left arm to introduce his second nasty surprise to the proceedings. The spring-loaded stake shot into his hand and, without so much as a word, he drove it immediately upwards into the vampire's chest. His aim wasn't the best, but he managed to get it in beneath the ribs, and a twist of his body shoved it handily up into that lump the vampire called a heart.
The vampire disintegrated. There was no other word for it. Air and life escaped him in one furious, incontinent rush, the flesh withering and desiccating behind it. Ezra pushed upwards with the stake almost purely by instinct, levering the fangs out of his neck even as the body hissed back into itself around them, and then whole monstrosity crumbled all at once and shattered apart around the wood. A third of its original size, wholly unrecognisable as anything that had once been human, the remains of the vampire cracked into dust and left Ezra bleeding and barely conscious against his rock.
He dropped to his knees, his head spinning and his hand clenched convulsively around the stake. He hoped to God the third was already dead, because if anything more potent than a flea came against him right now, he was almost certainly a dead man. What the hell had he been thinking, come out here by himself? Shooting from a distance, a fine idea, except there were three of them and you could only shoot one before they knew enough to move. So fast. Why did he always forget how goddamned fast a vampire could be?
He heard a noise, a rush of air as something superhumanly fast came back into range, and then a crunch of dust and gravel as it came to a stop. He registered Nathan's voice, the cry of shock and concern. He really, genuinely did. He knew who'd arrived before he acted, but there was more than one instinct in motion here. He heard a vampire come back into range, and he'd triggered the second mechanism and had the derringer pointed Nathan's way before he'd so much as looked at the man. His hand shook around it, rather violently while he was still struggling for a breath, but Nathan had to have seen him fire it enough to freeze anyway. That, or Nathan just didn't want to startle him no more.
Ezra looked up at him. Kneeling in the dirt and the blood, the wounds on his neck dripping merrily away, Ezra looked up at the man he'd thought he knew and now had no idea anymore. Nathan stared down at him, over the quivering barrel of the little gun, blood on his shirt and his teeth still very much on display. Took a while to bring 'em back down after feeding, maybe. Especially when the vampire was wounded too. Took a while, Ezra thought, to be able to put your teeth away.
"Ezra," Nathan said softly. Not a command. Not even a plea. Just an acknowledgement, maybe. Just remindin' Ezra that they knew each other. Well though. That was easy enough for him to say.
"... It doesn't make sense," he managed, his voice hoarse and broken and angry. He could hear it, though he hadn't the strength to change it. He looked up at Nathan, all his confusion and his fury defiantly plain to see. "You can't be ... I would have known. Damn it, Nathan. I'd have known. I'd have to."
Nathan made to move, held out his hand as though to reach towards him, and Ezra had snapped the gun up between them before he'd even thought. Nathan froze, and Ezra shook his head, biting his lip against the sudden pain in his neck.
"I loaded 'em both," he rasped viciously. "Silver, Nathan. I loaded 'em all before I came. Kindly don't come closer, please. Not just yet."
"I'm not gonna hurt you," Nathan said, tired and angry and a little fierce himself. "Damn it, Ezra, when have I ever hurt you? You think I didn't know what you were? I saw that stake of yours when JD arrested you the first time. I've known from the start you were a hunter. You think if I was gonna hurt you I wouldn't have done it then?"
... Known from the start. But of course he would have. That'd been part of the reason Ezra'd stopped carrying his arsenal around here, the odd looks he'd gotten when the Judge had locked him up that time. He'd wanted them not to think he was crazy, carrying sharpened bits of wood around on a spring. Nathan ... Nathan was a vampire, though. Nathan'd known then and there what they had to mean. And Nathan ...
He'd not hurt him. Not for being a coward and a bigoted ass in the Seminole village, not for being a hunter in Four Corners. Not once, not ever, and had their positions been reversed Ezra was far from sure he'd have been as forbearing.
But still. Still. Nathan was a vampire. That was ... That didn't make sense, and until it did, until it could, Ezra was keeping a silver bullet nice and ready, thank you very much.
"How are you feeding?" he asked, jabbing the derringer angrily in Nathan's direction. "How are you hiding, Nathan? Where the hell have you been getting ..." A horrible thought occurred. "Oh. But you're a healer, aren't you. I don't remember anyone dying, though. If you were using your patients for that--"
"For God's sake," Nathan spat. He didn't come towards Ezra, though. He took a step back instead, almost stumbled it, and when Ezra managed to look up and focus on him, it wasn't so much anger as utter, sickened horror on his face. Nathan shook his head blankly, staring down at Ezra, and it didn't take Maude Standish's son to see the flat denial there. "For god's sake, Ezra. You think I ... you think I could? You think I could do that to folks?"
No. If you'd asked him even a day ago, Ezra would have answered a very clear and concrete no to that question. Nathan was ... Nathan was Nathan. As truly close to a good and honest man as a crook like Ezra had ever seen, and all the more painful, the more reassuring, for that.
But that Nathan wasn't real. That Nathan had been lying to him, lying to him so goddamned well that Ezra hadn't even seen it happening, so well that it took fangs and a full-blown vampiric battle before Ezra even realised a lie was possible from him. Even more than the fact of the vampire itself, even more than knowing what Nathan was, that was what tormented him. He'd known those three monsters for what they were the second they'd stepped off the stage. How the hell had he never seen Nathan for what he was?
He had to know. More than anything in his life, Ezra had to know that, even if Nathan up and killed him for it straight afterwards. He needed to know how, and to know why, and in hopes of getting an answer he let the hand with the derringer sink slowly and exhaustedly towards the ground. He took his weapon off Nathan, let it fall to the ground beside him, and simply stared up at this man he'd thought had been his friend.
"How are you doin' this?" he asked, more tiredly now than angrily. "I should have known, Nathan. How did you hide it from me? How do you hide something that big?"
Nathan didn't answer. Not for a second. He just looked down at Ezra, about as tired and as wounded as Ezra himself, and then he looked away, cast his eyes up to the moon and the sky as if he could find some answers there. He brought a hand up, scrubbed it helplessly through short-cropped hair, and dropped stiffly down onto his haunches in front of Ezra. He spread his hands, the wounds on his face and neck splitting a little bit as he shrugged.
"I don't know," he said softly. "Honestly, Ezra, I don't know. I mean, I wasn't going to tell you about it. You're a hunter, and I'm not lookin' to get myself shot. I've enough people wanting to string me up just for the bits they can see, I wasn't going to give anyone anything more if I could help it. I don't think I was ever planning on telling you. I don't know why you never saw it, though. Especially today, when I saw you figure those three out the second you saw 'em. I don't know why you looked at me, and didn't see."
Ezra closed his eyes. He shouldn't have. Any other vampire, he wouldn't even have thought it. This was Nathan, though. Even still, even after everything tonight, there was some part of him that couldn't feel threatened by the man. Not like that. There was some part of him, even now, that just honestly didn't think that Nathan would hurt him.
"At first," Nathan went on, still over there, still not taking advantage of the opening Ezra had left him. "At first I thought it was because you'd seen me first in daylight. A lot of people think we can't go out in it, though I'd have thought you wouldn't have lasted long as hunter if you'd really believed that. We're mostly human during the day, no fancy stuff, but a human can still kill you good and proper if you're not expecting him."
Ezra snorted exhausted agreement. Didn't they all of them know that full well. He thought he sensed a little answering smile, too. Though that could have been the blood loss. The wound hadn't actually gone too deep, the stake had been introduced too early and too decisively for that, but the steady trickle from it was maybe starting to be a problem regardless. Almost absently, he reached up to press his hand there, and sensed Nathan's suppressed motion of concern. Ezra opened his eyes blearily, just to look at him. He sat down sideways off his knees, let himself slump into the rock behind him, and this time he saw as well as sensed the open concern in the other man's face. Still Nathan. Goddamnit. Human or vampire, no matter what, the man was still Nathan.
"... After a while, I knew it wasn't that," the healer went on, after a long second. "You're too careful for that. And I remember our first meeting, Ezra. I know you better now, I know that's far from all you are, but I still remember it. I wonder sometimes ... You ever think that maybe you didn't see the vampire because you were too caught up with what else I am?" He gestured towards himself. His face. His skin. "Like the lady said earlier, Ezra. Vampires are the masters, not the slaves. Folks like me ... maybe you reckoned instinctively that folks like me didn't count."
Ezra looked away, hard and sharp, and felt that sour sensation in his stomach that had become so far very familiar these last few months. Shame, hot and hateful, and the awakening of a conscience he'd thought for so long was lost beyond recovery. Had hoped was beyond recovery. Life had been so much simpler without it.
"... It was my master, you know," Nathan went on softly. Gently, and absolutely without pity. "They weren't wrong there. I didn't want this, Ezra. I didn't get a choice. He turned me so he'd have a better plaything, and I killed him for it, but what's done is done. I couldn't go back afterwards. I could escape him, but not what he'd made of me. I never wanted to be a monster."
"Nathan ..." Ezra tried, his slack hand slipping away from his neck. Nathan caught it. He'd leaned in, knelt forward with that speed and that grace again, and caught Ezra's hand to press it back and stem the blood once more. Only a bare trickle now. It was slowing in good time. Only a small wound, after all.
"I don't need human blood often," Nathan said earnestly. "I'm not stealin' from people, Ezra. It's a demon, this thing inside me, it'll take any old blood sacrifice. I get paid in chickens half the time as it stands, and I'm a better hunter than most of you give me credit for. I don't need to hurt anyone. The ones that do, the ones like those three you helped me kill, they do it because they want to. Because they like it. I'm not ... God, Ezra. I'm not that. Not anymore. I never want to become that again."
Ezra blinked a little at that. He stirred, waking himself from the dual lethargy of pain and exhaustion, and squinted at Nathan more curiously. "Again?" he asked, prodding gently, and Nathan's hand tightened around his own. Nathan flinched, and looked away in some shame of his own.
"You were in the war," the ex-slave said quietly. Almost an explanation in and of itself. "I was angry, Ezra. I was so angry. They made a monster out of me, and I wanted to show it to them. I wanted them to reap what they sowed, and I wanted them to put me down when it was done. I don't pretend I was anything less than monstrous then."
Ezra nodded carefully, around the hands still pressed against his neck. "I know," he said. "I saw it. Not you. You weren't the only one with that idea, on either side. I'd only heard stories before then. My mother trained me, because she'd tried to seduce the wrong man of wealth and wound up half-dead because of it, but I hadn't seen. Not until then. Bloodbaths tend to draw out all the monsters, it seems. Human or otherwise."
"... Yes," Nathan said, and he drew away from Ezra now. He sat back up on his haunches and gave Ezra room to breathe. "I met one myself. Confederate. He was the second one of my kind that I killed."
Ezra blinked at him, and offered perhaps the smallest of smiles. "So was mine," he said, not without some humour. Such strange and terrible things they were turning out to have in common tonight. "Confederate, that is. My commanding officer, as it happened. It's fortunate that battlefields are such confusing places, or I'd probably have been shot for that. There are some things a man finds it hard to serve under, though."
Nathan blinked at him. He didn't know what to do with that, Ezra thought. Fair enough. Ezra wasn't particularly sure what he'd meant to be done with it either. He shook his head, and changed the topic slightly once again.
"You wanted to be put down," he said, slowly and carefully, watching Nathan's face. "That didn't happen, obviously. What changed?"
Nathan blinked again, and then smiled a little bit. Happier, more hopeful, if still slightly shamed. Maybe it made Ezra a horrible person, maybe it was that selfish streak of his again, but he found that little thread of shame almost reassuring.
"What I told y'all," Nathan said, with that small little grin. "I was stretcher-bearer, in between the bloody bits. Vampires, you get a nose for the blood, the heart, for when a person's too far gone to come back. I had a talent for finding those who could still be saved. The doctor who trained me, he figured out what I was. He told me I could keep on that road if I wanted. There were enough people around us trying to kill or be killed. Or, he said, I could do something else. Be something else. Put people back together instead of take them apart, heal them instead of preying on them. He said if I really wanted to have revenge on the thing that did this to me, then that would be the way to do it." He grinned, shrugged. His own wounds had dried up, Ezra noticed, even if they hadn't closed. "I thought he might be right. So I gave it a try."
"And succeeded," Ezra noted, carefully levering himself back to his feet at last. Nathan blinked up at him, and Ezra ... Ezra held out a hand to him, after a second. Ezra offered him a hand up, and kept hold of it gently when Nathan stood beside him. "Your skin might have been one reason I never saw you, Nathan," he told the man quietly. "I admit that. But the other one is that you just don't act like a vampire. Not like any one I've ever met. Nobody dies around you. Nobody bleeds if you can help it. Hell, right this minute I'm not bleedin' anymore because of you. It doesn't exactly make folks think 'vampire' when they look at you, you know?"
Nathan ducked his head, not quite smiling and not quite not. He looked down at their joined hands. There was blood in the creases of Ezra's skin, dark against the pale of it. It didn't show up so well against Nathan's, though they both knew it was still there. They'd both done some bleeding tonight, in more senses than one. They'd both done something else, too.
They'd destroyed some monsters together. Even without knowing they could trust each other, they'd still fought together, and they'd still won. Like the Seminole village all over again.
"You're not much of a hunter to look at either, you know," Nathan commented, somewhat teasingly. "Hunters usually have more sense than to go wandering out into the dark alone after three damned vampires. Damn it, Ezra, do you know how easily you could have been killed?"
Ezra coughed, wincing at the pain still clinging to his neck, and raising a pointed eyebrow because of it. "I may have figured it out," he said wryly, but gripped Nathan's hand in turn, pointing at the rakes across his face with the other hand. "You didn't look to be doing so well yourself. Though the swordsmanship was beautiful, I have to say. You move like water or something. It's really rather unfair."
Nathan opened his mouth. Closed it again after a second. He shook his helplessly, and looked back at Ezra once again.
"I don't even know how to answer that right now," he admitted, reaching up to scrub at his face and wincing as it pulled at his wounds. "Oh, blast it. We've got to get cleaned up. We've got to get this cleaned up. Those poor people, whoever they were. We've got to find an explanation for being out here, for where those three off the stagecoach ended up ..."
"We say we don't know," Ezra interrupted firmly. "We saw the coachman heading out this way, followed him because we're civic-minded like that. We lost him in the dark, and then we stumbled across this lot a little later. Someone or something came at us, scratched you up and maybe got a shot off at my neck. We don't know who or what it was, and we never did find that coachman. We'd have raised the alarm, but we had to limp home first, and in our current conditions nobody's gonna be surprised that took us a while. Anything else, any little details, we can figure out on the spot, and if push comes to shove we can try to tell the truth. Only if push comes to shove. Barring that Vin finds something funny in the tracks around here, most of that should hold up okay."
Nathan stared at him. "You," he started, shaking his head. "You come with these things on the spot. I've never figured it out. You lie like a goddamned rug, Ezra."
Ezra flashed him a grin, quite bright in the moonlight. "Conman, remember?" he pointed out. "I may not be that much of a hunter, but I am a damned fine cheat and a liar. The two go together rather better than you might first suspect." He paused, and then decided to chance it. "Besides. For a man who's been hiding his true nature from damn near everyone, I'd say you're not so bad a conman yourself, Mr Jackson. Speaking as one professional to another."
For a second, it looked like a step too far. It looked like that accusation, as teasingly meant as it was, might test their tentative truce just a little too much. Nathan didn't like lies. Even living one, he didn't like them, and he didn't like to be accused of them either, however accurately. And yet. After a moment, one very fraught moment in which Ezra was abruptly reminded that he was holding a vampire's hand, Nathan's expression relaxed once more, and the man even chanced smiling at him.
"I doubt I'm yet in your league, Ezra," he said softly. "I concede the point, however, since right now I can hardly deny it. We'll both by lying through our teeth before the day is through, and I guess I might as well get used to the idea."
Ezra snorted softly. "It was nicer when the damned things didn't wander through, wasn't it?" he asked wryly. "Nearly a whole year without a fuss, and then three vampires happen and everything's up in the air again. Damned nuisance, I call it. Most inconsiderate of them."
Nathan stared at him for a second, with the most complicated expression Ezra'd ever seen on that face, and then, almost abruptly, the man tugged him close with their joined hands and reached out to cup the back of Ezra's skull. Ezra had half a second to be startled by this, to worry about it, and then Nathan had tugged their foreheads very gently together, reeling Ezra in until they could just about rest against each other. His hands weren't cold, Ezra noticed. He didn't know why he hadn't thought it before. For a vampire, Nathan's skin wasn't really the deathly cold so many described.
"I'm glad you're here," the man whispered softly, leaning against him. "If you'd told me when we met that one day I'd end up saying that, I'd have called you a liar. But I'm glad you're here, Ezra. I'm glad you're one of mine."
And Ezra might have protested that, the possessive part, he might have denied it, but he was remembering hearing a horse's scream, and how stupidly glad he'd been to know that meant it wasn't Nathan. How relieved he'd felt, to know the dead were none of his.
"... Likewise, Mr Jackson," was all he said, and counted it good enough to be going on with.
A/N: I apologise for any mistakes. This one all came out in a big long rush, and I'm too tired to try and fix it. I mostly just wanted vampire!Nathan all of a sudden. Um. My apologies?
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