Blood And Pleasure Pt 02

Tuesday morning was markedly better than Monday morning for Ty. He awoke refreshed, feeling vital and well-rested, having slept through most of the previous day. Also, it helps to have been spared any nightmare creatures visiting him in the dead of night. He was able to get up, and get his coveralls on without vomiting anywhere, a marked improvement in his book.

"If you got sick again, I

don't

want to hear about it!" Mal's sing-song voice carried in from the hallway, accompanied by a cackle from Bek.

Ty sighed. Despite one of them being a vampire now, his sisters clearly weren't having any trouble falling back into their normal routine. He moved to unlock his bedroom door, but found it already ajar.

The message from Bek was clear:

Locks can't stop me.

He rubbed his temple-

or perhaps I never locked it at all?

He certainly hadn't eaten or drank anything, judging by the growling in his stomach, and the dryness of his mouth.

Just because vampires are real, it doesn't mean everything is beyond explanation.

He mused.

The house was small, veritably cramped. He and his father both had small solo rooms, but the girls shared the former master bedroom when Bek was in-town. They shared a single bathroom, although Abraham occasionally brushed his teeth in the kitchen sink on the floor below (if only to escape the mess his children created).

"You stink!" Mal brushed past him, a book bag slung over her shoulder. "Try brushing your teeth sometime, it'll help." She quipped, ducking into his room as though it were her own, a clear endorsement of his tendency to lock his door.

Ty sidled into the bathroom, finding Bek seated on the tank of the toilet in a two-piece pyjama set, feet on the lid, flossing.

"She's right, dental care is essential." She winked, baring her teeth and letting her fangs extend for the barest moment before withdrawing back to their normal length.

"Don't do that!" Ty hissed, peering out the bathroom door. "Dad would be a lot less understanding than me!" He opened the mirrored medicine cabinet to withdraw his toothbrush, noting Bek's lack of reflection, the floss seemingly floating in mid-air above the toilet. The sight unsettled him, and he quickly closed it.

"Oh ye of little faith." Bek snickered. "I think he'd be overjoyed to hear it." Her voice was slightly muffled as she attempted to reach her rear incisors.

"Overjoyed to hear what?" Abraham stuck his head into the bathroom, causing Ty to almost fumble his toothpaste in surprise. The grizzled older man was at just too obtuse an angle to get a reflection, or lack thereof, from Bek- but a few degrees more and he'd spot the issue.

"I'm thinking about joining a sorority." Bek lied smoothly, withdrawing the floss from her mouth, and hooking a thumbnail under an incisor as if to pick at a speck of food she hadn't been able to dislodge. Ty forced himself to focus on his own oral hygiene, stifling his laughter at the thought of Bek hanging out with sorority girls. "You know, make connections and all that stuff." She shrugged.

"I think it's a fine idea-" Abraham began.

"Terrible idea!" Mal called over his shoulder, before taking the stairs downward three at a time in search of coffee. Their father sighed.

"I think it's a fine idea, it'll give you an opportunity to learn to work well with others." Abraham adopted a fatherly, mentoring cadence, like a preacher attending to his pulpit. "And of course, to build friendships to last a lifetime, why, I remember in my day-" He started into a sermon regarding the importance of building connections, but was again interrupted by one of his daughters.

"Why, back in my day you could buy a whole house for two nickels and a bucket of clams, pulled fresh from the river!" Bek adopted an exaggerated 'crazy old man' accent, comically miming using a cane, even in her seated position. She'd always been the one to take the wind out of her father's sails just as he got into one of his famed speeches.

"Remind me why I pay your tuition?" Abraham gave her a mock scowl, but his twinkling eyes belied his true feelings. Ty knew that at his core, his father was a family man, and doubtless enjoyed having all three kids under one roof.

"Something about putting my smart mouth to good use?" His older sister quipped as she hopped down from the tank, dropping her floss into the trash and scooting past her father, giving him a peck on the cheek for his troubles. Ty almost choked as he rinsed, thinking about how she'd been using her mouth the previous day. Abraham grumbled something noncommittal in response, distracted by the pinging of his phone. Despite his childrens' best attempts to drag him into the modern day, he insisted on keeping notifications on at full volume.

"We've got to roll in a little early, Ty." The older man quietly observed his son for a moment. "Are you feeling okay? It seemed like you were at death's door this time yesterday." Ty slapped his toothbrush back into its holder, thinking guiltily about his supernatural regeneration.

"I'm good, it must've just been a stomach bug or something." Ty met his father's gaze. He hadn't realized that they were almost the same height -Abraham had always loomed so massively in his life that he'd seemed taller- but in that moment, they were equal. Abraham regarded him for a moment, his face impassive.

"If you do end up feeling poorly, don't push yourself." He paused, as if considering launching into another sermon, but he kept his voice low, keeping their conversation private. "Being part of a team means you have to know your own limits. I won't be disappointed if you have to tap out, I'll be

mad

if you don't, and end up hurting yourself." The mood was momentarily dour, the air heavy with expectations, a father's dream for his son.

*Ding!*

Abraham's phone exclaimed, breaking into their silent moment.

"I won't let you down." Ty gave his father a weak, awkward smile.

Abraham returned the smile, with much more warmth and reassurance, before turning back out into the hallway.

Ty's phone buzzed as he followed his father, down the hall, and to the top of the stairs.

Bek: don't be so serious ;)

Ty: Things will get a lot more serious if you get caught.

Bek: don't you mean if 'we' get caught?

Ty: Well, I won't be getting staked if we get caught.

Bek: I guess we'd better be super duper sneaky

Ty: Can you just try to not get in trouble while we're out? Just like, stay home, don't take risks.

Bek: tell you what, I'll be here when you get home

Bek: waiting for you

Bek: so we can do the thing

Bek: you know, like the blood drinking thing?

Ty: I know what you're talking about, you don't have to keep bringing it up.

Bek: okay grumpy, have a good day and such <3

Ty grimaced as he stepped out the front door of their house, towards the '01 Ford Abraham kept running with string, sweat, and duct tape. Despite his reservations, he couldn't deny that one part of the creature his older sister had become was still the same old Bek: her fundamental inability to take anything seriously.

They drove into work in a terse silence. The wider Philadelphia metro was changing, gentrifying, putting up giant apartment blocks for the wealthy and privileged. But regardless of where you go, some streets and neighborhoods are just resistant to the passage of time, stubbornly holding onto decade-old slatted siding and dilapidated front porches. Residents remain destitute despite living at the theoretical intersection of commerce, holding out until retirement would allow them to abandon the factory floor (or until they died there).

The correct term for a steel plant depends on its precise purpose- production of iron from ore, refinement of iron into steel, casting, scrapping, rolling and roughing of all kinds. But the residents south of Philly didn't particularly care for the minutia of such distinction, and simply referred to it as "the plant", "the mill" or "the factory" interchangeably. From Ty's experience, it was a lot more rolling and scrapping than casting and production, those dirty and energy-intensive processes having been long shipped to Pittsburgh, or more recently, overseas, leaving only the looming smokestacks to remind the city that it used to make things.

Ty stared up at them as he and his father trudged up towards the employee entrance. He'd been relegated to paperwork for six months, barely getting out of the office to tour the labyrinthine production floor. Doing it this way allowed him (as Abraham had insisted) to know the inputs and outflows of each process, and to assign a hazy approximation of a number to each day's production quota.

Ty caught himself as he clocked in, almost returning his timecard to the section reserved for office workers. He grinned at his father as he slipped it down a row, alongside the rest of the crew. He wasn't about to get stuck doing paperwork for the rest of his life.

They donned their PPE, and set out across Two-West, the most familiar area to Ty, cluttered with welders, jawing away to one another, heedless of their flaring acetylene torches. A dizzying maze of corridors followed, cobbled together throughout over a hundred years of operation.

Three-West, full of jumping sparks and an acrid black smoke, workers wearing hoods waved to them through the plastic of a hastily-constructed, seemingly-temporary fume tunnel.

Then Two-East, with marching conveyor belts covered in jagged, glittering bits of metal, totally uninhabited by humans but bustling with robotic arms snatching and spinning with an unerring speed and alacrity.

They had to flick the lights on in Four-North, a cold husk of a former blast furnace which gave him chills. The walls were cracked from years of thousand-degree heat, and now sat cooling in pitch darkness for the majority of the day.

Finally, they emerged into another, much smaller chamber claiming to be Two-West again, empty except for a freight elevator and associated stairwell descending into the darkness below, and a single battered plastic folding chair. Abraham made an expansive gesture, as if to welcome his son to his new workspace.

Ty paused, casting about in confusion.

"Are we-?" He scratched his head, looking towards his father for clarification.

"Take a seat." Abraham's eyes seemed to dance in the flickering of the fluorescents. He gestured towards the chair. "Don't get up until you're told." Ty's eyes narrowed, uncertain, but after a moment he did as he was told. The chair was predictably uncomfortable, and teetered more than he would generally be comfortable with so close to an open elevator shaft.

But he had bigger things to worry about. The fluorescents flickered above him, then suddenly died, plunging the room into blackness.

Ty breathed heavily, feeling the darkness press against his eyes.

Some kind of hazing thing?

He guessed, before a sudden sound made him almost jump out of his skin.

"Do you fear the dark?" The words echoed from the metal walls of the room, deep and bass, with a guttural undertone which made his arm hair stand on end. His head whipped around, unsuccessfully seeking to triangulate the source of the question. It was all around him, and he would've taken it for a speaker if it hadn't been so clear.

"What the fuck is this?!" Ty exclaimed, still seated, but only an instant away from jumping out of the chair, hazing ritual be damned. His own voice echoed back at him this time.

A pregnant pause, as if prompting him to answer. He sighed.

"I guess I'm a little bit scared of the dark, okay?" After his experience in the past couple of days, he wasn't about to pretend the nights were going to pass particularly easily, even if Bek was out of his hair for good. "Can we, like, turn the lights back on?" He asked, to nobody in particular, hating the quaver in his voice.

As if to respond in the affirmative, a single overhead illuminated the floor in front of him. Standing there instead of Abraham, a tall, bearded black man with a wide-brimmed hat, and knee-length black coat. Ty jumped again, he hadn't heard the man, nor anyone else, moving in the darkness.

"You're right to fear the dark." The man intoned, with a sense of formality, a scripted, stilted tone which oddly gave Ty a little reassurance that he wasn't about to have his organs stolen. It was like theater, playing out in front of him. He became aware of more lights slowly flickering to life. A dozen, then perhaps thirty similarly-dressed men stood around him in a semicircle. The weight of their eyes bore down on him. "In the dark live creatures, beings who have terrorized humanity since the dawn of time." The man continued, raising his hand, pointing at Ty's chest. "You have been chosen thrice, by your ability, by your lineage, and by your untarnished soul." He felt a twinge in his stomach. "Will you stand against the darkness, and join with our brotherhood?" The question seemed to hang in the air.

Ty looked left and right at the now fully-illuminated group of men around him. He was certain he recognized some of them as workers in the plant, but was unused to seeing them outside of the work context. They all seemed serious, and several were sporting weapons- rifles, swords, even a polearm of some sort. In the third row, Ty spotted Abraham, similarly-adorned with a black jacket and wide-brimmed hat, but still wearing his reflective work vest beneath it.

His father gave the barest of nods, barely a movement, but enough for Ty to play his part in the game. He looked back towards the questioner standing in front of him.

"It's not a rhetorical question, son." The bearded man flashed a grin up at him, and a small ripple of chuckles spread through the crowd.

"Of course, yes, I'd love to join." Ty tried to match the level of sincerity of the older man, but wasn't sure he'd managed it.

What am I getting myself into?

He mused, but a brief glance towards his father provided him some sense of certainty, another microscopic nod.

For a moment, no response.

"Then be welcomed, and join your new brothers!" The group around him began to whoop and holler, closing in on him in a much more jovial manner. The group began to joke and jostle him, as though he'd just scored a perfect game of darts. The bearded man extended his hands, shaking Ty's and pulling him to his feet in short order.

"Congratulations, son, you're a vampire hunter now!" Ty bit his tongue in shock at the announcement, right before he was inundated in a flurry of handshakes, names being shouted his way, and pats on the back.

The day after finding out his sister's vampiric nature, he was already being press-ganged into hunting her?

"It's not really something we can prepare you for ahead of time." Abraham explained.

Ty had been pushed along by a throng of his newfound brothers, down the stairs to a subterranean portion of the complex, proudly proclaimed as

'Two-West-Lower'

by a sign on the wall. Through a heavy, deadbolted security door, he had emerged into the vampire hunters' hideout, a sweeping complex hidden beneath the mill.

He caught a glimpse of a vast operations center with large screens and whiteboards marked

'Suspect'

and

'Confirmed'

, mapping out the whole of the Rust Belt and New England. Through another security door, he spotted an armory- various weapons, modern and archaic, hanging from hooks on the wall. The facility could easily house a hundred people, with offices, signs proudly indicating the presence of dormitories, and a large general meeting area in the center, clearly intended for collaboration.

Abraham and the older bearded man -Landrey, as he'd been informed once his head stopped spinning at the sudden change in his understanding of his father, and his place of employment- had sidled him into a private office for 'debrief'.

"It's more something that you have to take in all at once." Landrey agreed with Ty's father, hooking his hat off his head, tossing it smoothly onto a wall peg in a single fluid motion. "The whole 'vampires are real' thing tends to freak people out, and letting them think it over usually results in a lot more ditching town than you'd hope." Abraham nodded in rueful agreement. The interior of the room was similar to a normal middle-management office of the kind Ty had worked in upstairs, but for a snarling wolf's head mounted on the wall, staring down at him with malice.

"The

'Vampire Hunters'

thing is a bit of a vestigial title, officially we're

The Agency of Special Affairs and Evaluations

." Abraham added, following Ty's eyes to the wolf's head. He grimaced. "There are a lot of bad things out there we have to take care of, but vamps are our speciality." Ty stared at him, and for the first time in his life, he saw his father wither under his gaze. Abraham had always been a paragon of virtue, of a hard day's work yielding benefits, of not taking shortcuts to reach your goals and behaving honestly to everyone you met. Yet, he'd been living a lie for Ty's entire life.

"So, you do this every day?" Abraham shifted uncomfortably in his seat at the question. "Has this always been your real job?" Ty felt the world spinning around him in shock. Landrey cleared his throat, speaking gently.

"Tybren-" He began.

"Just Ty." Ty corrected, absent-mindedly. "Only my middle school math teacher called me Tybren." Landrey gave a hearty chuckle.

"Pardon me,

Ty

, please understand, your father has been sworn to secrecy since before you were born." He gave a sweeping gesture towards the door. "Everyone here has been, and will continue to be for the rest of our lives." He paused, steepling his fingers, the picture of contemplation. "It's because we believe in what we do, in what this organization stands for, in defending those who can't defend themselves." Ty nodded, almost mechanically. Landrey's words were a salve to his wounded perception of his father. If nothing else, the values he'd been brought up with had been consistent. He fixed Abraham with a steady gaze.

"I get it." He saw his father's jaw muscle flicker, as though he was attempting to hold in a sigh of relief. Ty gestured around at the facility more generally. "All of this, I understand, you wouldn't have done it if it weren't serious." Abraham nodded, seemingly still not trusting himself to speak.

"It's serious all right." Landrey spun a few degrees back and forth in his chair. "More serious than I can even express." Ty took a deep breath.

"No more lies, not now, not ever." It wasn't a request. Landrey's eyes narrowed for a moment, but then he nodded, and Abraham gratefully did the same.

"There's no point in it, you're in now, so there are no more secrets I have to hold from you." He reached out to clasp Ty's shoulder, a two-decade weight seemingly lifted from his shoulders.

"So I'm guessing you guys don't do much actual milling over here?" Ty joked, eliciting a grin from both older men.

"Not us, although the rest of this place is an actual steel complex. We're more focused on the killing of dangerous bullshit creatures." Landrey pointed up at the wolf head before using the finger to begin counting off. "Werewolves, treents, sirens, demons, fairies, and U.O.P.'s." He paused, Abraham clarified.

"Unexplained Occult Phenomena- Basically a big bucket for anything we don't understand yet." He gestured towards the door. "But we're always trying to crack the code, so to speak." Landrey nodded, and continued.

"And of course, vampires, our most dangerous prey." At this, Ty raised an eyebrow questioningly.

"What makes them worse than a werewolf?" He nodded pointedly up at the fangs of the creature mounted behind Landrey's desk. The older man pursed his lips.