100% Freshie Chapter 33 --PG-13

[librarian_7]

Disclaimer: The characters from Moonlight are copyrighted by CBS, and no infringement is intended.

Special note: This work takes place in the world of Moonlight, but your favorite vamps are not the main focus. Sorry about that; try to enjoy the story anyway. You might be surprised.

100% Freshie

Chapter 33

Bradley was having a little difficulty breathing through the bag that covered his head, although he couldn’t help but wonder grimly if his breathing problems weren’t about to increase exponentially. He could hear others moving in the room, and moved his wrists again, testing the strength of the bonds that held him in his chair. He thought one of his ankles was tied a little looser than the other, but it was still not enough to make a difference.

He didn’t understand it; it was broad daylight, had to be. It had been no later than nine in the morning when they’d taken him. He’d thought he was safe in the daylight, thought he had all the long hours of the day to decide what to do. He didn’t want to give up on Danni, not yet, even if she’d made her choice clear early that morning. He didn’t accept it. He couldn’t. She was clearly under some sort of mind control. He could still save her, he thought.

Then, as he was dropping Cry off at her apartment, they had taken him. She must’ve tipped them off somehow, although he remembered hearing her beg them not to hurt him even as he’d slipped into unconsciousness. It was all very confusing.

“I believe our—guest—is awake,” a voice said with evident amusement. “Tied to a chair, a bag over his head. This is so old school. I like it.”

“Can you be serious? For once?” another voice demanded, a low harsh growl. This one was closer to him, he thought.

“Please,” said a third voice, elegantly modulated. “I’d be most interested to see that.”

Three. Bradley felt a drop of cold sweat trickle down his back. Three of them. In daylight. He hadn’t heard any names, but he’d seen enough movies and television to know that if he did, or if that hood was pulled from his face, he was a dead man. Who was he kidding? He was probably already a dead man. Suddenly, his view of himself as a fearless vampire slayer evaporated. He should have listened to Danni, when she told him she was leaving. He should have taken the hint, and left her to whatever fate she was working out for herself here in L. A. He was an idiot, and he was paying for it now.

“You know,” the first voice he’d heard continued in a snarkily sarcastic tone, “serious or not, I fail to see the need for a summit conference here. You couldn’t just end this guy without help?”

Mick shot Josef an annoyed look. He leaned in close to Bradley’s ear and spoke in a low, very serious voice. “Listen, son, how interested are you in walking out of here in one piece?” he said.

“What do you think? I would prefer it,” Bradley snapped. If he was truly already dead, he had nothing to lose.

Josef laughed. “This kid has possibilities,” he said. “If it weren’t for the whole ‘Son of Van Helsing’ thing, I could like him.” He paused. “Stakes, though, playing with stakes is not so good.”

Will’s response was not so kind. “I do not appreciate anyone who leaves dead bodies in my front yard. It’s against the neighborhood association code, for one thing.” He folded his arms and leaned against the wall. “You can’t tell me there is any way we can let this moron go.”

Bradley straightened his shoulders, deciding to play the brave card. “I was rescuing my girlfriend from a vampire. That isn’t murder.”

Mick looked at his fellows with a crooked smile, then back to their prisoner. He shook his head. “If vampires existed, you might have a point. But you do realize there’s no such thing, right?”

“But—but there are. I’ve seen—“

“What have you seen?” Will said. “What have you really seen?” His voice was harder than the others. Maybe he was unhappier. They had pulled him away from the hospital, where Hunter’s life was still hanging in the balance, to help tend to yet another of Danger’s messes. No amount of reassurance that he’d be called immediately if anything happened was enough. He knew he should be there, and not here, and he resented the intrusion.

Bradley turned his head. Even blind, instinct made him look in the direction of his questioner. “A lot,” he started. “The clubs…the men in black. All those women dripping off of them, and the ones frantic to get close to them. I saw some of those girls close up. I saw the wounds. I saw the scars where they were bitten. Fang marks. They have fang marks all over their bodies.” Even now, the thought was enough to make his gorge rise. One girl had giggled as she pulled up the hem of her skirt to show him the marks high on inside of her thigh.

“Right,” Josef said, amused at the way Bradley’s head whipped around toward him. “Careful, friend, you’re going to give yourself whiplash.”

“I’m not your friend.”

“You’d better hope you are. I tend to keep my friends alive.” Josef paused. “I was going to ask, before you saw fit to interrupt me, if you’d ever seen any of these women—“

“They apparently call themselves ‘freshies.’ It’s sick.”

Josef sighed. “Did I mention the interruptions? Yes? Good. Have you seen these women being bitten? Seen anyone actually drinking blood? Anyone with, hmmpf, actual fangs?”

“But the scars…the wounds…”

Will laughed harshly. “This is Hollywood. Don’t you understand makeup? Special effects?” He was here, he might as well act his part.

Bradley was silent for a little while, and the three vampires waited patiently to see if their persuasion would work. He felt like the only thing he could hear was his own breathing, heavy inside the hood, the staleness of the air making him a little light-headed. Perhaps they were making sense, more sense than he was, with his new conviction that such creatures were hidden among the humans of the world. “I don’t understand. If it’s not true—why? Why all the bullshit about vampires?”

Mick laughed, and if it sounded forced and false to Josef, he didn’t find a need to comment on it. “You said you saw the women. Good-looking, weren’t they?”

Bradley nodded. “Most of them, yeah.” These guys were pissed at him, he knew, but they didn’t seem as otherworldly and evil as he expected of vampires. They seemed reasonable.

“There you go, then,” Mick said. “Bradley, you came all the way from Texas to California to find your girlfriend, didn’t you? So you understand that men go to—great lengths to attract women.”

Josef snorted. “Sometimes it’s the other way around.”

Will looked at the other two, and stepped forward to pull the hood off Bradley’s head. “I’m tired of talking to someone without a face,” he said, as Bradley squeezed his eyes shut against the bright light in the room. He had decided he really didn’t want to see these three men. It seemed unhealthy.

“Look at us, asshole,” Will said sharply. Mick felt uneasy. In his mind Spence, whom he knew only slightly, was by far the weakest piece of this equation, and he wondered if they’d made a mistake including him. But he had a certain interest in Danni, and it was his property where Bradley had staked Tyler. “Look at us.” He didn’t touch the bound man, fearing to put his cold skin against Bradley’s. The third time, he growled. “Look at us.”

Bradley turned his head slowly, blinking painfully. “I don’t want you to think I’d be able to identify you.”

Josef laughed with genuine delight. “Trust me, if it’s a problem, you’ll be the one being identified. If they every find you.”

Mick frowned. “You’re not helping, here.”

Taking a seat on the edge of a table, Josef shook his head. “You’re not seeing the whole picture.” He turned his attention to the prisoner. “Bradley, now that my friend here has gotten your attention, let me ask you something. Several somethings. First off, when you look at us, what do you see?”

Bradley looked around warily. “Three—men.”

“What about us? Anything extraordinary? Take your time.”

Bradley studied them for a few moments. He might be from a small town, but he was from the country club set there. Two of these three—the styles were different from back home, but he could tell expensive when he saw it. Custom tailoring, high-end brands. The man speaking to him might not be much older than he was, yet he exuded power and wealth. The others—both were well dressed. Both had that aura of power that he recognized. “You’re rich,” he said.

The blond man with the intense turquoise eyes frowned. “That’s—concise.”

Josef nodded in agreement. “That’s a start. You understand, don’t you, that being rich—it’s not easy. None of us started out rich, we earned it. We have what you might call high stress jobs.”

“We play hard,” Will interjected. “And sometimes—our pastimes are a little out of the ordinary.”

Mick folded his arms, watching. He was monitoring the boy’s reactions carefully, and it seemed that a bit of the irrational fear was ebbing. Maybe Josef had been right, when he’d cautioned against them trying to convince Bradley they were totally innocent. “We’ve got to let him think we’re guilty of something—just not what he thinks. No one is innocent, and even that idiot wouldn’t believe us if we claimed to be. If he believes the vampire thing is just some kind of decadent role-playing, we can manage him.”

Josef sighed, looked down at his hands as though in some embarrassment. “It’s not easy to explain,” he said, his natural evasiveness serving him well, “but we—and the other men you saw at the clubs—we like to play a little game with those girls. They enjoy it, we enjoy it—no one gets hurt. But it would be embarrassing if it became common knowledge.”

“But everything they told me—everything I saw—one of them gave me her card, and said she was a member of the Willing Freshies Society, she said the vampires drank her blood,” Bradley protested.

Josef shrugged, with an odd little smile. “Role playing. Although no one drinks real blood—very insanitary, I’d think. Other than that, what can I say—we try to make it as real as possible…and the results, man, the results….”

Will nodded right on cue. “Fantastic. Truly fantastic.”

Bradley felt a little sick. “And Danni? She’s a part of all this? Some kind of kinky prostitute?”

Mick nodded. “Yes and no. She’s—definitely a part of it. But not a prostitute. Just a willing participant. It’s not what you think—I mean, she’s a friend of ours,” he said. “I’d go a long way to see she wasn’t hurt. Or abused in any way.”

“But you’ve—you’ve—“

Josef interrupted. “We’ve told you it’s not like that. Drop it.”

Bradley looked down, trying to think. His head throbbed painfully, and he’d have given quite a bit for a glass of water. “This doesn’t add up.”

“Yes, it does,” Josef said simply. This was getting boring, and he had other business to attend to.

“Y’all are so worried about being embarrassed,” Bradley gulped, hating to remind them of what he’d done. “That you’d let a death slide?”

Mick looked sour. “A murder, you mean. That was no accident when you shoved that piece of firewood in his back. Funny thing—the way the movies say will kill a vampire, works pretty well on almost anyone.”

Will answered, his voice even harder than usual. “Collateral damage,” he said. “He was a good friend of Danger’s—Danni’s—but sometimes we have to accept losses.” He was thinking there were other losses, more real losses, that he was not prepared to accept, just now, and it colored his voice.

“You know,” Mick said thoughtfully, as though it had just occurred to him, “we could insure he would never tell tales, and still let the cops nail him for Tyler’s murder. Posthumously.”

“What does that mean?” Bradley asked nervously.

Josef raised his eyebrows. “You need to work on your vocabulary, Bradley. Posthumous means, after death.”

Will was pacing, his anger evident. “Quit playing around. We need to know if we have a deal with this joker.”

Bradley looked up, a little hope seeping into his eyes. “A deal?”

Mick nodded. “Here it is—you get out of town, today. You don’t bother Danni, and you don’t talk to anyone, about anything you saw—or think you saw—here. Ever. If you do—we have contacts in Texas.”

“Friends in Houston,” Josef said, ticking off the cities on his fingers, “Dallas, Austin—I have a particularly old friend in San Antonio.”

“My contacts are mostly in Fort Worth, these days,” Will added, “but I do have a few friends in Austin.”

“And on our side, we won’t be encouraging the eyewitness to your crime to talk to the police,” Mick said. “Very few people would get a walk on this kind of thing. Especially since we could help the police prove premeditation, which would mean life.”

Bradley nodded. “I think we have a deal.”

Josef—the only word for it was stalked—across the room to stand very close in front of Bradley, forcing him to either crane his neck up to look at Josef’s face, or stare directly at the man’s waistline. He compromised by focusing on Josef’s flawless necktie.

“You may think,” Josef said softly, but with an absolute vicious intensity, “that you’re getting off lightly, here. You’re not. If—you—ever—decide—the risk of being raped in prison is even remotely close to an acceptable price to pay for the opportunity to piss us off, it will probably be
the last mistake you make.” He paused, waiting for the threat to sink in, and if Bradley had known the word implacable, he would have used it to describe the look in Josef’s eyes. “You know, if I really were a vampire, you’d already be—not dead, not nearly so quickly, but somewhere far along the path to wishing you were.” His eyes took on a strangely eager, predatory look, and Bradley suddenly thought the man must be slightly insane, and the impression made by Josef’s next words did nothing to dispel that idea. “I’d open up your flesh one bite at a time and take your life slowly. Very, very, slowly.”

Will laughed, and said, “I know someone who’d love to help you with that.” Bradley, flicking his eyes from Josef to the other man, thought those remarkable turquoise eyes took on a momentary silver gleam, but dismissed it as a trick of the light.

Mick, meanwhile, came up and forced his way between Josef and Bradley. “The boy made a promise,” he said. “He’ll stand by it.”

Josef twitched his head slightly to the side, as though snapping himself back into the moment, and gave Mick a mirthless smile. “Ever the idealist, my friend. Of course he will. But he needed to know the stakes.”

Mick nodded. “You made your point,” he said. “I think it’s time we get him out of here.” He looked at Bradley. “I’m going to put the bag back on. You don’t need to know where this building is, do you?”

Bradley gulped. “No, sir,” he whispered, then his voice gained a little strength. “But—one thing.” He looked around a last time at the three men in the room. “It’s Danni. She’s not in trouble because of me, is she? She’s not—you wouldn’t—hurt her?”

All three of them smiled at the mention of his old girlfriend, but it was the man with blond hair who spoke. “She’s probably never been better protected in her life.”

As Mick escorted the re-blinded young man out of the office, Will made a move as if to follow, but Josef stopped him with a hand on his arm.

“You were right, you know,” Josef said. “Texas is—very well protected.”

“I was lying,” Will responded. “She’s been nothing but trouble to me from the beginning. I’m done.”

“And you, my friend, are ignoring most of her possibilities,” Josef smirked. “You’re making a mistake.”

Will favored him with a thoughtful look. “If she was everything you imply, you’d never have known her—possibilities.”

Josef only laughed.

[francis]

Bradley should have done more research. He watched too many movies.
They keep him thinking that the stake killed Tyler. Don’t give away more secrets than necessary, good for them. Now they spin the story so he thinks that vamps don’t exist. Brilliant.
Will is ready to abandon Danni. That’s really sad. He never really got to know and cherish her. To me it seems, he wanted something else than she was. He tried to fit her into his life, but only on his terms.