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Everything looks wrong.
The world is hazy, her vision too sharp.
Even from the top of the watchtower, Apo cannot get the scent of warm blood and beating hearts out of her nose.
Apo drops her head between her knees, the velvety softness of her dress rough as sandpaper against her cheeks.
Her eyes squeeze shut, and for a moment, Apo pretends to be anywhere but here. She brings herself back to firelit evenings and a couch draped in quilts, to a sapling in a pot and a laugh like music and everything Cherri, Cherri, Cherri.
For a moment, it almost seems to work.
For a moment, Apo forgets the cold.
For a moment, the hunger dulls to an ache all too easy to ignore.
And then—
Some knowledge, an awareness heavy and urgent and terrible, blossoms from their still, dead, heart—
And yanks, a chain pulled taut and distance written into their bones—
New blood.
The vampires didn't keep their end of the bargain.
Someone else has been turned.
No. No.
Who—
How—
They thought—
It happens before Apo can think twice.
One moment, they're curled up at the lip of the tower, the next moment, they've leaped and in a single, dizzying lurch, Apo changes.
Bat, she thinks, I'm a bat.
It happens in the span of an eyeblink. She didn't have time to fall.
And she doesn't have the time to find her wings.
So Apo flies. Graceless, messy, more like drowning than soaring—
But she does it.
Somehow, she makes it.
(The alternative was splattering all over the ground like an absurdist painting. The alternative was leaving the new one to rot.)
The pull leads her to the Castle.
Something else pulls her eyes downward.
Down, down, down—down below the bridge that had so caught her attention, a few weeks or a thousand years ago.
There's blood in the water.
If Apo were human, it might have escaped her attention. Might have blended in, just another shadow in dark water.
But Apo isn't, and blood stands out as if spilled on snow.
She swoops low, and—
A shock of sodden blonde hair. That stupid frilly collar. A black ribbon around the forehead, barely hanging on.
Martyn.
Wings stutter midair, a squeak morphing into a voice morphing into a cry—
"Martyn! What did they do to you!?"
Apo's back on two legs without thinking, fingers fluttering over damp, chilled skin in search of injuries unseen.
Assess ability, they think, some years-old lesson abruptly dragged to the forefront of their mind, asses condition, apply any first aid possible, relocate to a professional.
Apo's—fine.
Martyn is injured, bleeding from several points, including a leg broken badly enough that Apo can glimpse bone—
The worst of it seems to be the gash, or maybe it's better described as a crack, along his forehead and extending back across his skull, bleeding with the fervor expected of a head wound, and then some.
Shit.
That's—
That's bad. That's really bad.
Is it safe to move him? They think so, but they've really only got basic first aid training, they're no Legs—
But what they do know is that neither of them are safe from watching eyes or questing fangs.
Apo steels herself, hooks an arm under Martyn's back and one under his legs, paying as much mind as she can to the broken one, and hoists him up with strength she's unsure is her own.
Martyn's completely incapacitated, right now. If a vampire got their hands on him, he'd be helpless to do anything about it.
…
They're a vampire.
And he'd be oh so easy to bite—
The thought intrudes like a blade through flesh.
Blood stains Martyn's face.
It smells like—
It smells like black licorice.
Sweet.
Sharp.
An acquired taste, so thoroughly coating her tongue and the back of her mouth that for a moment, Apo is terrified she couldn't keep her fangs to herself.
Her stomach twists, and Apo cannot tell if it's from nausea or hunger.
Apo swallows the saliva pooling in their mouth, curls their arms tighter around his terrifyingly still form, and keeps on moving.
She will not hurt him.
She's—
She's gonna save him.
She has to.
Martyn's still bleeding.
Apo's not gonna make it to town fast enough to prevent him from losing too much, are they? They need to staunch those wounds.
They prop him against the roots of an old tree, and, for the second time in two days, the dress sewn by the love of Apo's life tears.
But this time, it isn't from the fangs of a man who called her a meal.
This time, it's from Apo's own hands, tearing off strips of her skirts to bandage a friend.
She wraps the makeshift linens wherever she can secure them, and her hands are shaking, but the wrappings are tight enough to slow the flood.
To buy them both some time.
But—
He's still cold.
Should they be worrying about hypothermia or shock more than blood loss?
Fuck.
They need to get him back to town. Now.
Apo reaches for him once more, except—
No.
No.
No.
He's stopped breathing.
He's gone still.
His heart's gone silent.
And Apo—
Apo doesn't hesitate.
They lunge forward, manhandling him till he's flat on the ground, and time chest compressions to the beat of a song she and Cherri would always spin to at the Spring Festival.
Apo inhales, filling their lungs with air they don't need, and then they dip down, press their lips to Martyn's, and pray they can breathe for him long enough.
One of his ribs makes a sickening crack.
Then another.
He's still so cold.
Cold like a corpse.
He feels a little bit like Apo. Frigid and dead.
Dead, Apo thinks, he's gonna end up dead.
"Martyn" and "dead" don't click together in Apo's brain. Attempting to connect the two is simply incorrect, like insisting that the sky isn't blue or bread pudding is actually good.
It's not his time yet. Martyn should live till he's old and gray and wrinkly and twice as annoying as he is now.
Dead.
Cold.
Time.
Apo opens her mouth again, and tastes black licorice.
Blood.
Wait.
Something almost clicks, then. Except it doesn't. There's no realization like a flash of light, no sudden thought of salvation.
In fact, there is no thought at all.
Only Apo, the vampire, and Martyn, the human, and the one thing that binds them both.
Apo brings her wrist to her mouth, pops fangs she's never used before, and sinks them into the frost-thin skin of what used to be a pulse point.
The flavor of Apo's own blood bursts on her tongue.
Just hold on, rich boy. All you've gotta do is hold on.
I'll handle the rest.
She pries open Martyn's mouth, making some vain attempt at gentleness, and lets cinnamon and honey drip, drip, drip.
The blood trickles behind his teeth and dyes the too-pale flesh of his tongue stark crimson.
Apo closes his lips, pinches his nose shut, and—
It's almost funny, how quickly it works.
Her blood goes down without an issue.
Martyn looks…almost soft, like this, in the space between death, life, and something far worse.
Or is it true softness, Apo wonders? Can lifelessness be tender?
What is she even thinking, anyway? She has no idea if this contrived bullshit will even work.
Maybe it'll just kill him! Maybe she's an idiot, addled by fledgling vampirism and whatever made Apo always stumble at inopportune moments.
Apo brushes soaked bangs, sticky with blood and sweat, away from Martyn's eyes.
His eyelashes are as blonde as his hair.
Whoever's listening, whatever gods, saints, or spirits that are out there—
Please.
Just let him have more time.
Air brushes Apo's fingers, featherlight, just enough that she notices.
He's breathing.
He's breathing.
The rise and fall of his chest is ragged, and she can hear a quiet rasp when he inhales—
But he is breathing.
And that means he will live.
And, as Apo watches, awe stealing her motion, Martyn is knit back together.
It's unnatural. It's unnatural as turning into a bat and drinking blood and being alive and dead at the same time, and yet—
And yet.
This time, Apo watches wounds disappear, and the thing that floods her chest is hope.
Something stings in the corners of her eyes, and even as blood streaks her face in a facsimile of real salt tears, Apo does not care.
She hates this. She hates the fear and the threat and the fight and the hunger, but at this one stunning orange dawn in the endless dark, Apo does not hate the thing she has become.
Because that same blood sits across from her, injured and bleary and far from lucid but alive, alive, alive.
Her Martyn will be just the same annoying, impulsive, ridiculous human as before.
And when Apo carries him home, crossing a threshold they don't even remember to fear being barred from, and sees blue eyes blink open to peer into their own, that final shard of fear melts into mist.
~~~
Months later, when all of the blood's been drawn, when the sacrifices have been made, and the woman who claws her way out of Oakhurst is a shadow of the one doomed to enter it, when she has finally made her way home, Apo Kuna will find black licorice nestled in the flower-patterned candy dish on her living room table.
It will be an utter coincidence, yet when the scent of it finds its way to her, she will freeze, statue still.
Her love will place a careful hand on a shoulder that never used to be so thin, and a fresh wave of ichor will trace her battle-sharpened cheeks, and together, the two will mourn a bond Apo never got to claim till his body kissed the earth.