From Her Vein to the Floor

"Believe in me;
I know you've waited for so long.
Believe in me;
Sometimes the weak become the strong.
Believe in me;
This life's not always what it seems.
Believe in me;
'Cause I was made for chasing dreams."
- Staind

His white-knuckled grip on the steering wheel. His foot too heavy on the gas pedal. His heart pounding in his chest.

Why couldn't he just teleport to her? Why couldn't he just will himself to her side? Why were his powers failing him when he needed them most – when she needed him most?

But they weren't failing him completely. He could feel her, like his very soul was reaching out to her, tendrils of energy stretching through space and time to grasp her and pull her to his side.

She was close now, he decided, and he began to slow down as he scanned the houses that lined the street. How would he know which one Torryn was trapped in? He realized how silly that thought was when his eyes fell on a house with no front door and a bit of blood spattered across the white siding that lined the wall of the front porch.

Of course it was obvious. Of course she'd made a scene. She wouldn't be Torryn otherwise.

He parked along the side of the narrow road across from the house, between a gold SUV and a rusty red pick-up truck, nearly hitting them both and the curb in his haste to get inside the house. He was in soon enough, however, and the first thing he saw was Torryn, naked and bloody, sprawled face down on the bottom landing of the stairs.

"Torryn," he whispered, rushing to her side. He tugged her onto his lap, twisting her torso to turn her face toward his. "Torryn?" he repeated, his voice rising in volume and panic. He slapped her cheek hard enough to leave a dark red mark, but her head only jerked and then lulled against her shoulder. "Oh, God. You're not dead, are you? Torryn!" He was just about to start shaking her when a cold chuckle from the top of the stairs caught his attention.

"She'd better not be dead," Antony's father remarked coolly, grinning wickedly down at Skylar. "I still need her, and really, all I did was throw her down the stairs a little bit. Just a little bit." He moved down a stair, and Skylar pulled Torryn's body tightly to his chest, glaring up at him.

"Don't come near her," he snarled, his voice so deep and husky that he barely recognized it. "I'll kill you if you try."

An eyebrow arched in a cool challenge, the man took another step down. "Do try."

The wooden railing lining the stairs was suddenly jerked free from its base, whirling up the stairs as if caught in the spiraling winds of a tornado. It splintered into a dozen small, sharp stakes during its journey, and each and every one embedded itself in some part of the vampire's body – everywhere but his heart and his head, Skylar's true targets.

With a sigh forced from airless lungs, Antony's father – what was his name again? C-something? Caesar? – lowered his hands from their shielding positions over his chest and his face. A single stake had pierced each of them, and he pulled them free first, his lips pursed in agitation. "That stung a little, boy," he drawled, "but you're not going to defeat me with such petty tricks." Both of the wooden strips fell to the stair below his perch with a soft, almost musical clatter, though they didn't lie there for long. At Skylar's command, they both launched back into the air, one aimed at the vampire's back and the other aimed at his chest. But as fast as Skylar was, Caesar was faster. His hands flew into action, one arm bending at an impossible angle to reach behind his back and catch the stake there as the one before him did the same. It was so quick, so simple...so sickeningly simple...

"Come, now," the man laughed, holding both stakes out before him and giving them a mocking wiggle. "You're going to have to try harder than that!" His body was already beginning to reject the rest of the wooden sticks, pushing them out with the rapid closing of the wounds. A bit of blood followed, and the various light clatters of the stakes hitting the floor and rolling down the stairs were accompanied by the splatters of blood on wood.

Skylar was beginning to go into complete panic mode now, no longer confident in his abilities. Caesar was like no one he had ever faced before; he was an undead vampire, so much faster and stronger and more resilient than his normal opponents. He caught all of the bloodied stakes and sent them whirling into the air once more, sailing right at the man, but Caesar leaped forward, right through the cloud of wood. In a heartbeat, he was on the bottom landing before Skylar, the stained tip of a stake piercing each of the boy's shoulders. He cried out as a sharp, blinding pain spread through his arms and down his chest, and the stakes that had been under his command bounced off of the wall at the top of the stairs and tinkled uselessly to the floor.

Caesar chuckled darkly, twisting the wood in his shoulders with a sickening squishing sound. "Why are you even here, boy?" he taunted, his voice a low purr, arrogant and seductive. "You can't save her. You're too weak, even weaker than my son."

Skylar couldn't see, could barely feel. He saw only black and felt only the sharp ache in his shoulders as the vampire pushed the stakes deeper into his flesh, forcing him against the wall and not stopping until he felt the tips hit bone. I'm going to die here, he realized. He's going to kill me. He's going to kill me and take Torryn away. But he could barely hear his own thoughts beneath his screaming, a harsh, wordless shriek, loud enough to hurt even his own ears.

"Do you want to die?" Caesar asked, his words so enticing. "You seem like you want to die."

A stake twitched at the top of the stairs, held in the fingers of whatever power Skylar could muster through the haze of pain and fear, so small and frail that they could have belonged to an invisible infant. It twitched again, but then, the power was gone. The spikes were still.

The stakes were jerked none too gently from his shoulders, and he grunted, unwilling to scream again. The pain dulled a hair, but it was still too great to see through. He wondered if he had his eyes closed. He wondered if Torryn was still in his arms. He couldn't feel her. He couldn't feel anything beyond the harsh twinges in his shoulders.

"Or should I just leave you like this?" Caesar murmured, and Skylar felt a sharp stab of pain as something slid into the gaping hole in his left shoulder, something wet and warm, like a vampire's tongue. "You certainly don't taste good enough to eat."

"Get away from them," came a raspy snarl, and the weight of Caesar's body left Skylar's side. A crash followed, the sound of wood splintering and a man's grunt.

"Antony, my boy," Caesar said cheerfully, his words accompanied by the sounds of a bit of shuffling among the remnants of some wooden object. "Have you finally died?"

"I'm too pissed off to be dead," Antony snarled. Skylar's vision began to return just as a squabble began between the pair, and he blinked rapidly to ease the discomfort of his wide-open eyes, though he had no hopes of following the rapid movements of the vampires. Antony had to be dead. He couldn't have been moving like that, a dipping and darting blur of pale skin to match his undead father, if he wasn't.

"Torryn?" Skylar whispered, his voice coming out much rougher than he'd expected. It took so much effort to speak just that one word. "Are you...are you alive?"

Another crash resounded throughout the room, shaking the walls of the house, and Skylar turned his darkness-rimmed vision toward the fight. Caesar had just forced Antony shoulder-deep through a wall, and he'd taken to cackling and asking him how he liked being inside a wall. Skylar vaguely wondered what he'd missed earlier.

Antony planted his hands firmly on the paneling to either side of him and pushed his upper half out of the wall, the muscles in his bare arms bulging in a way that Skylar's never would, a sign of strength that he would never possess. He'd just leaped into the air, preparing to execute a roundhouse kick, when Skylar's attention was drawn elsewhere by a light shifting in his arms. Torryn was awakening on his lap, blinking up at him slowly. There was blood on her face, and Skylar vaguely wondered if it was hers, his, or both.

"Skylar?" she said, and the weakness in her voice made anger rise in Skylar anew. "Did you...come for me?" She was barely there; he could see it in the way her eyes were unfocused and always on the verge of fluttering shut again.

"Yeah, baby," he murmured to her, pulling her to him and burying his face in her neck. "I came for you."

"Are you bleeding?" she asked, her voice suddenly stronger.

"Yeah, but it's all right," he whispered, his words nearly lost beneath the din of the battle going on only feet from them, a battle neither he nor Torryn seemed to be fully aware of any longer. "We're all right now."

She pulled away from his embrace, and the lucidity in her eyes was strong enough, sudden enough, to stun him. "You're hurt," she said, resting her palms gently on the wounds. Skylar let out a sharp hiss of pain, and she immediately withdrew her hands, turning her gaze to his face with a frightened frown. "We need to get you to a hospital."

"Torryn?" came Antony's soft voice, and Skylar and Torryn glanced toward him in unison. He was staring at her with wide blue eyes, eyes empty but for a spark of joy, and his fangs glinted, fully extended to peek between his pale lips. Something wasn't right.

"Antony," she whispered, tears springing to her eyes. "Oh, Jesus. Antony."

Something wasn't right.

Caesar swooped in from somewhere across the room, tackling Antony to the floor with an enraged snarl. He wasn't playful anymore; he was dead serious, too serious. He went for Antony's throat with his stark white fangs, but the boy wedged an arm between them, and Caesar caught his wrist between his teeth instead. He ripped through it, tearing the vein open, and blood poured as Antony landed a punch to the man's face that sent him arcing through the air. He flipped and landed on his feet like a cat, back hunched and fangs bared in a hiss. Antony pushed himself to his feet, his eyes focused unblinkingly on Torryn. His body was covered in so much blood...

"Pay attention to your opponent, boy!" Caesar growled, ramming the splintered remains of a table leg through the boy's stomach. But Antony didn't even flinch; he merely slid the stake out of his body and swung it at his father's skull, connecting with a loud crack. Caesar tumbled head over heels through the air in an almost comical way, but Skylar didn't have it in him to laugh.

Caesar lurched to his feet and lunged at Antony again, already letting loose a punch strong enough to send Antony through the wall, but Torryn appeared before him, catching his fist in a small, girlish hand, and Skylar stared down at his empty arms in wonder. She'd just been there. Only a second ago...

"You're not touching him again," she said in a voice so oddly flat, so empty of emotion, that a chill crept down Skylar's spine in a hurry. She shifted to catch the next punch he let fly in her free hand, and the hair fell from her face to reveal a single silver eye. Was the other a normal human gray? It would be like that day Skylar had seen Antony's car flip, the day she emerged with one eye the wrong color – the day she told him she'd cheated.

"You're not touching him again," she repeated in that same vacant tone, her body not budging an inch even as Caesar struggled to pull his fists from her fingers. "Never again."

Antony took a step forward, resting a hand gingerly on the small of her back, and jealousy spiked through Skylar's body, hot and heavy. He staggered to his feet with every intention of walking over there and smacking that bastard's hand off of his girl, but he was on his knees before he could take the first step, his vision darkening as pain throbbed in his shoulders. He put his hands over the wounds, still oozing blood, and slumped against the wall. He'd lost too much blood. He was still going to die here, watching some dirty vampire put his hands all over Torryn – his Torryn, his girl, his love. "Torryn," he whispered, but nobody heard him.

He'd been forgotten.

-?-

Torryn gazed into the smoldering eyes of Caesar Warren, feeling nothing, nothing but the barest hine of anger and the cool weight of Antony's hand on her back. The undead before her tried to tug his hands from her grasp, but her hold was unrelenting. She was stronger than him now, stronger than them all. She just needed to keep channeling this inner beast of hers for a moment longer.

Antony's hand slithered from her back to her hip, and she felt a gentle nudge against her arm. Her eyes flicked down. It was the table leg that had pierced the boy's stomach only moments ago, his own red blood still dripping from the jagged tip. Her eyes darted back to Caesar's face as she nodded her assent to Antony.

"Goodbye, Mr. Warren," she whispered with not even a hint of feeling to her tone.

"You can't!" he screamed, his voice raised in an emotion she'd never expected to hear from him: raw fear. "What can you possibly accomplish without me? If you kill me, you're dead! You know it!" Antony's arm slid around her hip, between her side and her stone-still arm, and he thrust the table leg into his father's chest.

The man's final scream echoed, ragged and pathetic, even after she'd released his fists and let his body fall backward. It grayed before her eyes, becoming chalky and brittle in the time it took her to take a short breath, and it shattered the moment it hit the floor, breaking into dozens of dusty chunks. The broken table leg lay atop the ashen pile, a few dust particles caked in Antony's blood.

"Thank you, Antony," she murmured, turning slowly to face the boy. His hand was on her waist, sliding along her flesh as she spun, his skin like a cold breeze grazing hers. "For finally ending this."

"I should've done it sooner," he said with a shake of his head, his other hand resting on the side of her waist opposite from the first. "Before any of this. Before he could..." He trailed off, dropping his gaze to the floor, and she felt tears welling in her eyes.

"I was right, then?" she asked in a voice barely loud enough to count as a whisper. Her whole world was crumbling beneath her feet, and her legs began to tremble. "You're...You're..." That blessed emptiness, that haze of anger that blocked the rest of her emotions like a dam, shattered suddenly. Sorrow flooded her, a deluge that filled every crevice of her body until she felt heavy and weak. She would have collapsed if it weren't for Antony's hands on her waist, abnormally cold but just as strong.

He pulled her to him, his arms around her holding her almost tightly enough to crush her. "This doesn't mean anything, Torryn," he rushed to say, his voice a low rumble at her ear. "I'm still the same as I was. We're still the same."

"He's dead, then?" Skylar said in what could almost be mistaken as the bitter slur of a drunken man, and Torryn turned her head on Antony's shoulder to look at the human boy, still slumped against the wall at the bottom of the stairs. She stood up straighter the moment her eyes landed on him, a single tear finally rolling down her cheek. There was so much blood...and she'd barely noticed...Had he spoken earlier? Had she really forgotten him for so long? "You're gonna have two dead boyfriends if you don't do something soon," he told her, smugness entering his eyes when he saw the devastation in hers, "and one of them won't be coming back."