Chapter Text
The vampire had to be here, tonight. It had been months since Poe had reported anyone from his squad finding a body drained of all blood with two puncture marks in the neck, or sometimes, only one in the arm. He was clever,whoever he was. He was clearly playing with EMS and law enforcement, leaving his victims in parts of town where the cops would see their crumpled forms and write them off as overdoses. Some of the bodies looked a little too staged, though; there was unofficial chatter about this, but most people just thought he was a particularly busy serial killer.
Rose had some ideas about this one’s identity. Finn guessed that he was a cop, once, or maybe a paramedic. A good guess; as he knew well many people who chose that line of work did so because they wanted to exploit the people they ostensibly protected and served.
First, Finn just reckoned his Captain had some unsavory violent inclinations and was stealing and selling drug stashes, nothing more than a classic dirty cop who’d gotten away with it for too long. He was biding his time and documenting what he could. Until he confronted her, and that confrontation ended with him clutching a broken wooden chair in trembling hands and staring down at a large pile of ash. There had been an official investigation, and cover-ups, and he quit just before he could be fired. The local paper had reported on the inquiries into deaths in custody for months.
“I didn’t want to be a vampire slayer, I just wanted to be a good cop and keep people safe,” Finn said, “but things happened.”
When Rose walked the streets of her city, she imagined that this was what being a cop used to feel like for Finn, before he learned too much. She’d been an EMT once back when she was a dutiful pre-med daughter, volunteered at a needle exchange too. Now, she spent her Saturday mornings serving soup at the Rescue Mission; she knew the people on the streets here, prayed for them, and always carried Narcan in her purse. In turn, she learned about missing people that the authorities never knew existed.
These were her streets, in her city, only a few blocks away from the house she grew up in (and still lived in with her parents, who thought she was out at a Bible Study with her friend Rey). She had a rosary, a full braid of garlic smooshed into her cargo pants pocket, a knife (anything bleeds, anything can be decapitated), and a mallet with stakes that she stole from a surveyor at her day job.
For the plain old human monsters, she had a taser Finn had cajoled her into carrying, despite the disastrous days of training with it. He got her a taser when it became clear after only one hour at the gun range that she could not hit a barn door. She trudged the rainy streets decked out in hi-vis rain gear and a hard hat. A short woman alone was an easy target. A short person of less obvious gender who might be missed when they failed to clock back in to their road construction site made most people think twice.
To keep her mind off the thought that the latest vampire might be the same one who killed her sister all these years ago, she was diligently removing the anti-homeless bars from the centers of benches and stuffing them into a duffel bag. When she and Rey had gotten enough, Rey would sell the metal for scrap to some of her sketchier contacts, and they’d get tacos on the proceeds, her friend practically unhinging her jaw and inhaling them. She smiled in spite of herself.
They should do that soon. Tonight, Rey was sitting up with Luke, a smelly old man who was close to death now. But Luke fed her, took her in, and taught her everything he knew about vampires and trained her until she could kill a vampire with nothing more than a pointy bit of wood, a man with her bare hands.
She shouldn’t have come out here tonight, alone. She wasn’t planning to, but she couldn’t take another night of awkwardly scrolling on her phone in the living room, or sitting in her bed doing the same thing while trying not to look at the side of the room where Paige’s bed used to sit. Any casual observer would think that she had normal interests in pop culture and was serious about her civil engineering career (designing sewer and water lines for new construction sites, yay!). On weekends, she cooked and cleaned with her mother, got up at ungodly hours to go birding with her father, and was skilled at pretending to be a good Catholic girl into the bargain. Her rosary was more of a weapon for the here and now than a spiritual consolation.
The truth was, ever since her sister died, she was consumed by two goals: avenging Paige, and trying to be the perfect daughter she was to replace her. When she’d admitted as much to Poe Dameron one night after drinking too much, he’d asked her if she’d ever considered therapy.
“What if you do kill the one who ate your sister? What will you do with your life, then? You’ll still have the same relationship with your parents, and it doesn’t sound like anyone’s happy about that.”
She didn’t have time for therapy, and she didn’t believe in it. Poe just sighed and drew her into the tight, safe hug that only a gay firefighter was capable of giving.
She stuffed this bench’s divider bar into her bag and pulled out her burner phone, checking the iSpy app that Poe officially forgot she had. Usual numbers of drunk, high, or overdosed people out tonight, one fender-bender two streets away. She scrolled until Poe’s battalion number came up; checking a smoke alarm at a warehouse across town. That was in the same region as one spate of suspiciously bloodless corpses. He’d look around, and report back to their little crew if he noticed anything unusual in the morning.
This moment of distraction cost her dearly. When she felt the shadow move over her, it was already too late. Her feet slipped on rotten leaves, kicking uselessly as a gaunt man with a face that she’d first seen as a print of a historical painting slipped an arm around her.
She opened her mouth to scream, but something prickled at her throat. Right. Shit. Armitage Hux. This guy was old. Major Armitage Hux went MIA at the Battle of Waterloo, then returned…wrong, popping up like a poisonous mushroom at the heart of each war machine of the British Empire, becoming a Yankee when it was more advantageous to do so in more recent years. He still carried a dagger, in spite of all the advancements in weapons technology since he turned. She fumbled for her taser, but he pressed the blade in harder and coughed meaningfully. She sighed, and put her hands up.
He grabbed her wrists in a bruising grip and cuffed them behind her with a zip tie. He patted her down briskly, divesting her of her taser. He yanked out her garlic braid and tossed it into a gutter. Gloved hands, Rose realized in mute terror. Smart. He did the same with her mallet and stakes. When he chanced upon her rosary, he looked at it with distaste and muttered something that she later realized to be the Lord’s Prayer in Gaelic before wrapping it in an old-fashioned handkerchief and pocketing it.
“Much good it did you, and much good it did me,” he admonished, waggling a gloved finger at her.
She didn’t remember deciding to lunge and bite him, but she would forever treasure the memory of her teeth sinking into his gloved finger while Major (and many other ranks throughout the years) Armitage Hux yelped and flapped his free arm uselessly, heedless of the risk of discovery.
When she looked at his face, she noticed he was even paler than the baseline shade for a vampire of English (or if you had once taken a keen interest in the Napoleonic Wars and wanted to be technical, Northern Irish ) origin, and the bags under his eyes were too big to make it on any plane, even in checked luggage. He managed to pry his fingers loose and glower at her.
“I was hoping that we could talk sensibly,” Hux said. “You and your friends have taken out a lot of nuisances for me and made my business a little easier.”
Rose glared.
“Easy, child. If I wanted you dead, I would have done it by now.”
Yes, she lived at home, but this hurt. “I’m twenty fucking seven, ” she spat. And what do I have to show for it? Disappointed parents, a dead sister unavenged, a boring job that pays the bills, an unpaid gig as a vigilante. That I’m not even that good at.
He signed. “I’ve been around for over two centuries now. You’re young. Now, I’ll free your wrists, take your weapons as insurance, and we can go somewhere and talk like civilized people. How does that sound?”
And then, Rose’s abdomen cramped with the force of an army of evil gnomes with hammers inside of her, blood pooling in the panty liner she halfheartedly threw on this morning, Hux’s nostrils flared, and it all went to hell.