Chapter Text
The massive door of the church’s basement slides open along its unoiled tracks. Claude hums to himself, a complicated tune that dips quietly in and out of his vocal range. He flicks on the light, takes two steps down into the community meeting-room, and drops his duffle bag with a shriek.
“Hi, Claude,” Guillermo says quietly, still chewing.
“Guillermo?” Claude clutches his chest as he catches his breath. “What are you—”
Guillermo is prepared for all the different ways the question can end.
What are you covered in? Vampire blood.
What are you doing here so early? Bus either comes an hour before the meeting or five minutes after it starts. It would be rude to be late.
What are you doing here at all? Nowhere else to go.
What are you, full stop? Trying to figure that out. TBD.
“—eating?”
“Huh?”
“What are you eating?” Claude repeats.
“Oh.” Guillermo holds up the plastic tub. “Chocolate-covered espresso beans.”
“Cool, cool.” Claude clears his throat, picks up his bag, and approaches cautiously, like Guillermo might bolt. “Do you mind if I sit?” He points at the chair next to Guillermo.
Guillermo shrugs. “Sure, go ahead.”
Claude sits. He holds the bag on his lap. Inside, wooden stakes clank together. If he asks nicely, Guillermo could probably refill his bandolier. He wonders if Claude has a mini-fridge he could borrow.
“So.” Claude casts an approving, if confused, glance over Guillermo’s blood-stained collar and coat. “Came back to teach us a thing or two?”
Guillermo blinks in surprise.
“About what?”
“Staking vamps. Which is what I guess you’ve been doing, unless you’re way overdressed for your job at the abattoir. Dude, you were better than all of us put together after one meeting. I get why you didn’t show up the last few Wednesdays.”
“That’s not why,” Guillermo whispers.
“I never got the chance to say thank you for saving our asses,” Claude continues. “I’d be bloodsucker barbeque if it weren’t for you.”
“Don’t mention it.” Guillermo shifts uncomfortably on the folding chair that’s probably older than he is. He silently offers Claude the espresso bean tub. Claude looks at it, thoughtful, then pokes his hand in and takes a couple.
They eat their beans in silence.
“I, um—” Guillermo begins, still not sure where to start.
“Save it for the meeting,” Claude suggests. “Want an intro speech when everyone gets here?”
“No, thanks.”
“You sure? I can do a killer announcer voice. This summer, one man takes on the whole vampire population of New York City. His name… Guillermo.”
Guillermo, despite himself, laughs. It’s a surprised huff of air out his nose and the smallest crack of a smile, but it’s the closest he’s come to laughing in a while. He’ll take it.
Claude’s intro isn’t far off from how he’d felt at the end, last night. Backlit and standing tall, surrounded by carnage, his own name on his lips as a correction and a proclamation and the revelation of a secret all at once—he’d felt heroic. Larger than life. Summer fucking blockbuster type shit.
It didn’t last. And now he’s here.
Shanice shows up next. Her mouth drops open at the sight of Guillermo. She adjusts her glasses so frantically she pokes herself in the eye, then sprints across the room to nearly bowl him and his chair over backwards.
“Hey—” Guillermo hardly has time to yelp in surprise before the arms of an enthusiastic community college sophomore are wrapped crushingly around his neck, “—Shanice. How are you?”
“Oh my god,” she mumbles into the crusty shoulder of Guillermo’s coat. Without thinking, Guillermo returns the hug. He pats her awkwardly on the back.
“You’re, um, going to stain your sweater,” he points out. “I don’t think this is all dry yet.”
“Sorry, sorry.” Shanice pulls away. Her sweater looks mostly free of blood, but a sticky line of red has made itself at home along her cheek. Guillermo gestures to his own face. She frowns and rubs her sleeve across the bloodstain, smearing it more than taking it off.
“Holy shit,” comes a voice from the doorway. It’s Tonya, smiling disbelievingly from ear to ear.
“Hi.” Guillermo waves. There are now three people in this room staring at him with welcome and wonder on their faces. Genuinely, honestly happy to see him—and not just because he’s covered head-to-toe in drying vampire fluids. That’s new. “I guess we should… get started? I don’t even know where to—”
“Hold your horses. We’re waiting on one more,” Claude says.
“Oh, you got a new—”
“Yeah, I’m late, but I brought cupcakes so you’re not allowed to criticize me.” The last member of the Mosquito Collectors of the Tri-State Area bustles in, tupperware under one arm, and shuts the door behind himself.
Guillermo stands slowly.
“How’s it feel being the second most successful vampire hunter in the room?” Tonya asks their newest arrival teasingly. She punches him in the shoulder. He turns, confused, until his eyes light on their guest speaker for the evening.
“Oh, damn!” A grin breaks out across Derek’s face. “What’s up, Guillermo?”
“You fucking goat’s tit!” Nadja snarls from the corner of the ceiling in the fancy room as she rips chunks of plaster out of the wall and throws them at Nandor. “You and your shriveled raisin bollock of a brain!”
“My darling,” Laszlo pleads from the floor, “you’re making a—” he ducks a flying piece of the wainscoting, “—mess. Why don’t you come down here and we can discuss this like sane and civil creatures of the night?”
“There is nothing to discuss!” Nandor whines authoritatively. He crosses his arms and continues to sulk at the desk. White flakes of plaster coat his hair and beard like snowfall.
“Well, that’s not true,” Colin Robinson interrupts.
“Yes, for once I concur with Colin Robinson,” Laszlo says, pointing emphatically at him.
“Thank you,” Colin Robinson replies, genuinely touched.
“Now, I’m quite confident that our good friend Guillermo Delgado isn’t going to quack us,” he draws a thumb across his own throat, “in our slumber—”
“That’s not his name,” Nandor mumbles, sounding half unsure as he says it.
“And how would you know?” Nadja snarks. “Since you were so busy giving the lecture to an armed vampire killer that you let him fucking leave while you were blathering about?”
“Guillermo El Dorado?” Laszlo guesses.
“Nope.” Colin Robinson says.
“Guillermo DiGiorno!”
“It’s de la Cruz!” Nadja wails. “Come on, Laszlo, it’s not fucking hard.”
“Now, you didn’t know what it was either until—” Colin Robinson says.
“Am I the only one in this house who knows how to listen?” Nadja interrupts. “Unbelievable.” She throws another handful of wallpaper and wall at Nandor.
“The fuck was that for?” he cries, betrayed. “I was agreeing with you!”
“Ah, de la Cruz.” Laszlo taps his fingers against his temple. “From the French, I believe, meaning of the Cruise. I didn’t know our little chap was descended from sea-faring folk. How noble.”
“It’s actually Spanish,” says Colin Robinson, “meaning of the—Ahem, ‘scuse me. Of the c—Dammit.”
“A Spaniard.” Laszlo looks mildly scandalized. He shakes his head. “We should have known all along.”
“His family is Mexican. He comes from a long line of—” Nandor’s eyes go wide. He slams a fist down on the desk. “He was lying to me about the piñata farmers! How could he do that?”
“You knew?” Nadja shouts.
“Knew what? Knew about piñatas? What are you talking about, Nadja? Ouch!” Nandor rubs his nose as a piece of wood paneling strikes him in the face.
“Please do come down from there, my darling. You can throw things at Nandor just as easily from the floor.”
“Then I can take the high ground,” Nandor mumbles.
“What did you say?” Nadja’s eyes narrow and flash red.
“Nothing.”
“Guillermo,” Claude gestures to the half-circle of chairs, “the floor is yours.”
Guillermo takes off his glasses, looks down for something to clean them with, realizes every piece of clothing in easy reach is soaked in vampire blood in various states of dessication, and puts them back on.
“Sorry, can I just—” He makes some incomprehensible gesture at the group. “Hey, Derek?”
“Yeah?”
“Didn’t you…” Guillermo tilts his head. There has to be a more tactful way to put this. “Get eaten?” Apparently there isn’t.
“Oh!” Derek smacks himself in the forehead. “Yeah, you haven’t been here, duh. Should have explained. Um, no, I didn’t get eaten.”
Guillermo nods. A beat of awkward silence passes.
“I’m not mad you guys left,” Derek hastens to add. Tonya and Shanice mumble confirmation and pat him on either arm.
“How,” Guillermo keeps his voice as level as anyone could, given the circumstances, “didn’t you get eaten?”
Derek’s face lights up. There’s a streak of confidence in his smile that Guillermo is certain wasn’t there before. And he has nice teeth—noteworthy, of course, due to the conspicuous lack of fangs.
“Dude, it was metal as hell. I get yanked into a room, thinking I’m definitely about to die, when the light from my flashlight hits this disco ball hanging from the ceiling. The vampire that snatched me is like,” he cringes back, fingers curled out like claws, and hisses. “And in that second I’m thinking, shit, I really don’t want to get all my blood sucked out.”
“So he killed it!” Tonya interjects. “He staked a vamp like it was nothing. Wish I’d had the guts to do that.”
“It wasn’t as cool as our resident badass.” Derek holds out a hand toward Guillermo for a high five. “C’mon, Buffy.”
“What happened after?” Guillermo ignores the hand—he has strong negative associations with high fives. “I didn’t see you outside the house.”
“I got lost,” Derek admits.
“It’s a big damn house,” Claude says comfortingly.
“And then I hid in a closet.”
“Those were some big damn closets,” Claude adds. Tonya shudders.
“I heard a bunch of screaming and then it got quiet. I assumed everyone else was dead. And sitting there in the dark, thinking about how I’d let you all down—”
“This is my favorite part,” Shanice whispers, extremely loudly across the span of three chairs, to Guillermo.
“—it was like something flipped a switch inside me. Not in a sexy way,” he clarifies, still Derek through-and-through. “I had my stake and my cross and my holy water and I thought, what have we been training for, if not this, right here, right now? I can’t hide in this closet forever. I can’t let everybody die in vain. And I have to get the van back to my mom.”
Guillermo finds himself leaning forward, breathless as he waits for the story to end, to know what Derek did with his stake and cross and holy water and sudden rush of bravery.
“So I bust out of the closet, right,” Derek continues, “and immediately eat shit tripping over a dead vampire in the middle of the floor.”
“One of Guillermo’s,” Claude says proudly.
Derek aims another thousand-watt smile at Guillermo. It’s a free and easy happiness, happily given, bright on his face like a sudden flash of sunlight. People don’t smile at Guillermo like that very much.
“Shanice told me about your badass attic fight,” he says. “Stone cold. You do all your own stunts?”
“It wasn’t—” Guillermo feels his cheeks warm.
“It was,” Shanice cuts him off.
“If it was anything like you jumping four feet off the ground to stake that one in the kitchen,” Tonya says, “stone cold doesn’t begin to cover it.”
“I didn’t jump that high.”
“You jumped pretty fucking high.”
“I want to hear more about what happened to Derek,” Guillermo says, knowing his face must be flushed dark red.
“The rest of it isn’t that cool,” Derek admits. “I ended up at the bottom of the attic stairs. They had to come at me one at a time.”
“Conveyor belt of suckers,” Claude chuckles.
“Yeah, it was just like,” he mimes stabbing a vampire in the chest and grunts, “one,” he repeats the action, “two,” he does it again, “three,” another time, “four—”
“He gets the picture, Derek,” Claude says quietly.
“You get the picture.” Derek pushes his glasses up his nose. “What’s been up with you, man? On some full-blown Van Helsing shit?”
“Van—Why would you,” Guillermo clears his throat, “say that?”
“Uh, because I already used Buffy? Do you want me to call you Abraham Lincoln instead?” Derek laughs.
“I love that movie,” says Shanice.
“Movie night?” Tonya suggests.
Everyone in the room stares.
“After,” she adds quietly, sinking back in her chair, “after the meeting. Or another time. Whenever.”
Guillermo takes a deep breath.
“Yeah. Last night, I showed up to this big vampire event. A theater full of them.” He indicates the small arsenal tucked into his trenchcoat and the sheets of blood turning tacky down his neck and chest.
“By yourself?” Claude leans forward, elbows on his knees.
“Last night?” Shanice wrinkles her nose. “Why are you still all sticky?”
“Oh, vampire blood doesn’t congeal like human blood,” Guillermo explains. He snaps his mouth shut immediately. Why the fuck would you know that, guy who totally hasn’t lived with vampires for eleven years and been intimately familiar with how long human blood takes to clot and dry?
“You killed a whole building full of vampires? What did I say?” Derek looks at his friends with an emphatic gesture at Guillermo. “Epic.”
“What have you been doing all day?” asks Tonya.
“Being paranoid,” Guillermo laughs humorlessly. “Texting my mom. She worries. Um. Hiding under… bridges. And now I’m here, so.”
He shrugs, a movement meant to encompass A church basement seemed like a good place to hide from vampires and Enough about me, let’s get this meeting started and Please let me be part of something, let me be useful, let me belong somewhere again, please, please, please.
He’s not sure a shrug of the shoulders has the range to communicate all that desperation, but he’s been told he’s an expressive guy.
“You didn’t have anywhere to—?” Derek starts, curiosity and concern melting out his pores.
Claude clears his throat and the Mosquitos snap to attention. Guillermo feels a surge of relief.
“As you all know, tonight’s a study night—”
“I thought we were practicing with the stakes—” Tonya interrupts.
“It’s study night,” Claude repeats, “where we sit quietly and learn about vamps and don’t make too many loud noises that might spook a traumatized badass who is finally letting down his emotional walls, come on, guys.”
Guillermo smiles. He’s accustomed to a complete lack of subtlety from the people around him, but he’s less used to seeing an earnest, thoughtful purpose behind it. Claude’s consideration warms a part of him that has felt cold and empty more often than not for a long, long time.
Claude wheels out the slide projector again.
“We’re playing everyone’s favorite game,” he says.
“Vampire charades?” Tonya perks up.
“Tonya,” Claude says softly, “you know what happened last time.”
She hangs her head. “I know.”
“Sorry.”
“No, no, you’re right,” she mumbles.
“We’re playing,” Claude hits a button and a bright red pair of words in Impact font spins onto the screen, “vampire jeopardy!”
With a dissolve effect, the grid of categories and scores appears in bits and pieces beneath the title.
“I want Guillermo on my team,” Shanice blurts. She drags her chair across the semi-circle toward Guillermo. The metal legs screech against the floor in short, uncomfortable bursts.
Guillermo shakes his head. “Oh, I’m sure I’m not going to be any good at—”
“Alright! Derek and Tonya versus Guillermo and Shanice!” Claude announces. He wasn’t kidding about the voice. He stands next to the projector screen. “I’m the Alex Trebek of vampire facts, and today you’re playing for the ultimate stakes!”
“What?” Derek asks.
“I ordered some cool stakes off Amazon. Weighted, metal grip, the whole shebang. Got the email that they shipped last night.”
“How will that work, since we’re in teams?” Tonya asks.
“Each member of the winning team will get one. They came in a set of two.”
“But not until next week?” Derek chimes in again.
“I didn’t think we’d be playing jeopardy this week,” Claude explains. “Guys, I spent all of Tuesday afternoon on the graphics for this, can we get the game started?”
“I don’t have to play,” Guillermo offers with a shrug. “If you guys want two stakes. For the winner.”
“We’re already in teams,” Shanice objects.
“Come on, man,” Tonya says, balling up her fists excitedly. “Teamwork makes the dream work!”
“That’s the spirit!” Claude seconds. “Guillermo, as our returned prodigal slayer, you can pick the first category.”
“Uh, okay,” Guillermo laughs, more than a little put on the spot but without the surge of anxiety that tends to accompany the feeling. He picks a square at random. “I’ll take weaknesses for two hundred.”
The first question is easy—
“Silver!” Tonya blurts out.
“What is silver!” Guillermo says, a fraction of a second after her.
“Ding ding!” Claude points at him excitedly. “Answered in the form of a question. What’s your next pick, Guillermo?”
“Hell yeah,” Shanice whispers, fists raised in triumph but still balled up in the sleeves of her sweater.
“Um, what do you think?” He turns to his teammate. She looks thoughtfully at the board.
“I think we should do pre…” She frowns. “Predate—Pray—Pradiation—”
Guillermo takes mercy on her.
“Predation for five hundred,” Guillermo says, in for a penny. He doesn’t know if it’s the sleep deprivation, the remaining dregs of adrenaline, or the obscene amounts of caffeine, but he feels suddenly ready and eager to wipe the fucking floor with Derek and Tonya at vampire jeopardy.
“Ooh,” the rest of the group lows at the gamble.
Claude clicks something and a map of Staten Island fills the projector screen. A red Microsoft Paint circle encompasses a familiar patch of land, barely a mile from the house where Guillermo lived for eleven years.
“This neighborhood attraction,” Claude says, “provides a frequent feeding ground for vamps.”
Guillermo’s momentary confidence shrivels and blows away in a nonexistent wind. He feels his blood freeze solid, his heart working overtime to make up the difference. The part of his brain he turned off for a decade churns like an engine, like a sucking riptide under the surface of a cold river, like blood from a torn throat.
Dimly, he hears someone speak. It takes him a moment to recognize his own voice.
“What are jogging paths.”
“Correct!”
The basement erupts in cheers. Guillermo can’t breathe.
“Piss off, Colin Robinson,” Laszlo interrupts Colin’s talking head, which is supposed to be a private conversation just between him and the camera crew, but Colin’s roomies are very rude people so he shouldn’t be surprised.
“Let him do his talky-talk thingy,” Nandor grouches. “It’s not as if we are getting anywhere.”
“We could be, if you would take your massive head out of your massive asshole for five seconds!” Nadja hisses.
“We could be, if you or Laszlo would see reason!” he retorts.
“I couldn’t give a monkey’s what we do about your not-so-familiar familiar, so long as my head stays at the end of my neck and my heart remains unpenetrated,” says Laszlo, “but I won’t sit idly by while you talk to my wife that way!” In a low aside to Nandor that everyone in the room can easily overhear, he adds, “She came down off the walls, man. Take what you can get.”
“As I was saying,” Nadja spreads her fingers, palms upturned, the picture of calm, rational discourse, “Guillermo stopped us from getting our heads popped off like the daisies in front of the cream de la creams of vampire society, and then killed dozens of them, which means there will be more available seats next year and we might get invited again! So he deserves a big thank you from all of us.”
“Correct me if I’m wrong, Nadja,” Colin says, in the special voice he saves for using this exact phrase when speaking to women, heavily implying he knows beyond a shadow of a doubt that if she corrects him he’ll do nothing but smirk and say Fair enough, “but weren’t you arguing a couple minutes ago that we should kill Guillermo?”
“Yes,” she curls her lip at Colin, “but we can say thank you first.”
“Nobody is killing Guillermo!” Nandor stomps one booted foot firmly.
“On this, we agree,” Nadja says.
Nandor pauses. He stares at her in blank, cautious confusion.
“…We do?” he says hopefully.
“Yes,” Nadja nods, “we have to find him first.”
As Nandor and Nadja erupt into a fresh shouting match, Colin sighs. He can’t even enjoy the waves of frustration pouring off them both—the identical frustration originating in his own brain and meat body cancels it out.
“Water, water, every where…” he recites to the camera crew. His heart isn’t really in it, but he continues, “That’s perhaps the most oft-misquoted stanza in Coleridge’s works. The following line is actually Nor any—”
Guillermo keeps his cool through the rest of the game, though he and Shanice lose terribly. Vampire expertise aside, it wasn’t entirely fair of Claude to put the two shyest people in the group on the same team.
Not that he could have known one of them would have a guilt-ridden panic attack in the middle of vampire jeopardy. Surely that doesn’t happen every day.
By the time they reach the snack break, Guillermo is shaking so badly he barely manages to unwrap his cupcake. He gets his fingernail under the wrapper, tears the edge of the paper rather than pulling the whole thing away, and puts his thumb right into the frosting in an attempt to adjust his grip.
“Fuck,” he mutters.
“Hey.” A hand lands—gently but abruptly—on Guillermo’s shoulder. He whirls around and has a stake clutched in one fist before he can think. His other hand squeezes too tight around the cupcake. Frosting oozes between his fingers.
“Woah, easy.” Claude pulls his hand back. “Those are some reflexes. Damn.”
“Sorry.” Guillermo stows away the stake and starts looking for a napkin.
“It’s okay,” Derek laughs. “They’re grocery store cupcakes. If you were wrecking my snickerdoodles, then we’d have a problem.”
For a delirious second, motivated equally by a decade of living with Laszlo and a brief acquaintanceship with Derek, Guillermo wonders what wrecking my snickerdoodles could possibly be a euphemism for. He considers Derek’s straight teeth and soft-looking hands and something in him murmurs I wouldn’t mind finding out.
“He makes them from scratch,” Claude adds.
“What?” Guillermo shakes himself.
“The snickerdoodles,” Derek explains. “They’re my grandma’s recipe. I’ll bring some next week.”
“Oh. Like cookies.”
“Yeah, dude.” Derek leans in to shoulder-check him fondly. Just the brief contact is enough to make Guillermo’s fingers itch—whether to reach for a stake or something else, he doesn’t let himself find out.
Guillermo clears his throat loudly.
“I should really get going soon. Um. It was nice to see you all again, especially—” He pauses, momentarily distracted by the way Derek’s glasses turn his eyes owlish and luminescent. “I’m happy you’re not dead.”
“Thanks! Me too.”
“We wanted to talk to you about that, actually, Guillermo,” Claude interrupts before Guillermo can make to leave. “Where are you headed after this?”
“I, um. I don’t know,” he admits. “I was thinking of riding around on the subway until the sun comes up.”
All four mosquito collectors share a look.
“It’s not as bad as it sounds,” Guillermo rushes to explain. “It’s just very possible that the world’s governing body of vampires is after me, personally, so I don’t want to stay in one place too long.”
They all share another, louder look.
“Okay, that sounds pretty bad,” Guillermo amends.
“Pop quiz, Mosquitos,” Claude says. “What’s the safest place in the whole damn world for a vampire hunter?”
“Church?”
“A garlic store?”
“Alaska in the summer?”
Claude sighs.
“Wherever,” he answers his own question, “another vampire hunter is.”
Recognition dawns on the Mosquito Collectors of the Tri-State Area.
“We can take turns hosting you!” Tonya offers. “My girlfriend loves company.”
“My roommate is never home,” Derek says. “He wouldn’t care about a couch surfer.”
“Same!” adds Shanice.
Guillermo looks between the four faces looking kindly, eagerly, welcomingly at him. Waiting for his answer.
He thinks about it. He thinks about a cot under the stairs, the bed in his childhood bedroom, and a rotating cast of sofas. He thinks about Santa María on the wall of his mother’s kitchen. He thinks about the blood drying on his jacket, the frosting turning tacky in his hand.
“On one condition,” he says. “You help me bring my mom a mini fridge.”
Not so far away, upon the ledge of a second floor window of a very old house filled with very old beings having an argument that is quickly becoming very old, a raven lands.