'FAMOUS VACHONS FOR 400, PLEASE, ALEX"

by Apache

Content:
Slash
Vachon/LaCroix
Implied or Graphic Sexual Situations
No Violence

They say the really old ones can walk in the sun.  I've never met any, but if I ever do, I bet they'll be just like LaCroix.

I'd heard around the bar that he was originally a Roman, a consul who'd commanded legions, but you never know if that's just gossip.  I wouldn't put it past Lacroix to have started that story himself.

All I knew about him for sure was that he's Nick Knight's -- Nicholas de Brabant's -- master, the current owner of the Raven to which pretty much every vampire in town has to check in for blood, and the Nightcrawler of the airwaves.

If you'd asked me last week, I just would have said:  He seems to like me OK.

Children, here's a lesson from old Javier:  never, never be liked by Lucien Lacroix.

On the other hand....

~ ~ ~

I went down to the Raven to drink off the sour taste of a disaster with a mortal.  I was in a pretty wild mood. I'd been flying around just to burn off energy, but what I really wanted was sex.     What I really wanted bad was Tracy Vetter, but that isn't going to happen.  Not right away, anyway.

I got a glass of the 'special' and slouched at the bar, snarling internally over my day, alternately cursing my luck, my timing, my birth, my death, and the passion I felt for that woman. 

The usual din was howling around me, the usual bodies were writhing and twisting.  I took a quick look, but didn't see anything I liked.  And I know better than to go out and just kill when I'm angry.  I get careless, messy.  And blood‑‑ not even live blood-- wasn't really what I wanted.

"Ah, young Javier."  It was Lacroix; I hadn't even sensed him coming near.  "Drowning in a little glass of self-pity."

I can't say I found his approach endearing. 

"Did you know that you have something that I want?"

Incredulity cracked my voice.  "I do?  Me?"  I own four or five T-shirts, a jacket, a coat, a few pairs of jeans, some shoes, a motorcycle, and an electric guitar that would probably toast any outlet it plugged into. I think that about covers it.

That, and a priceless Inca quipu no one alive knows about.

Lacroix kept talking in a smooth, confiding voice.

"But of course, dear boy.  You are -beautiful-,and is it not the nature of our kind to covet beauty?"

Uh-oh.  "Well... thanks."  He owns this place, let's not be rude...

He reached out to stroke the ends of my hair.  I gritted my teeth over my desire to jump away.  There's a fair amount of the oldtime Spaniard in me yet; and in the years when I was mortal, men burned for less than what he was doing.

He took a strand of hair and ran it through his fingers.  I tensed.  Isn't the body language getting through?  "Look, Lacroix... I'm flattered, but that's not my scene."  Flattered-- what a lie.  I was thinking, to put it bluntly, I'd fuck and suck the whole rest of Toronto before I'd lay a finger on Lacroix. 

He seemed lightly amused.  "Oh, young Javier, I think you know -very little- of what your -scene- truly is."

"Maybe I'd like to find out by myself," came grating out.

"The young are always so unwise."  It sounded like an observation addressed to the general air, not a complaint I was meant to take personally.  Then he continued:  "For you see, if you were truly wise, you would realize that I have something that you want."

"What?"  It came out cranky.

"Silence, child. -My- silence."

My eyes narrowed.  This was a threat.  I didn't understand the terms yet, but the tone was clear.  I don't care about being hit on, but I really hate being threatened.  No mortals and only a few vampires have survived doing it.  I know it's macho bullshit, but then again... I really hate being threatened.

Then again, this was the very strange, rather ominous Lacroix talking.  Let's be cool.

My eyebrows went up.  "So?"

He smiled at me.  His version of a smile is a sort of line across his face that gets longer and curves up at one end and then at the other.  It doesn't get anywhere near his eyes.

It's not really something you want aimed at you.

"You have a little mortal friend, do you not?"

"So?"  I repeated.  I figure between me and Nick Knight, she's the safest mortal in town.

"She seems to be acutely... interested in our... community? I really don't know know how else to account for her frequent presence here.  It's certainly not for the-- music," he said, waving a dismissive hand at his own place.

"So?"  I said a third time.  Snappy repartee, Jav-- but I was becoming more wary of Lacroix with every word that came lilting out of his mouth.

"And she is beautiful, n'est-ce pas?  And you -want- her?"

I didn't even answer this.

"Don't you imagine that if our mutually esteemed Nicholas were to be assisted in putting two and two together, he might request your immediate presence out of town for, say, the next three or four decades?"

My head dropped to the bar.  I couldn't believe that I was having the guts kicked out of me twice in one day, both times over Tracy Vetter.  If only I could give her to Screed... but there's this one unfortunate little complication:  I think I’m in love with her.

And it's true:  Nick Knight is the notorious vampire-hating vampire, and if he tumbled that I'm waiting around to bring Tracy across...  my life could become... unpleasant.

"And the price of your silence?"  It came out in a mumble.  I knew already.  I didn't believe it, but I knew.

"Perhaps you'd care to step back-- "

My head came up: "--to my parlor, said the spider to the fly."

Lacroix smiled again.  "What an unlovely metaphor-- but perhaps not entirely inapt."

I straightened up and followed him into the back rooms of the Raven.  Spread-eagled in the dirt of the New World and dying, I had felt better than I was feeling at that moment.  I was telling myself I could take Lacroix.  Myself was telling me back, no way in hell you can.

I tried bluster first:  hey, I am a Spaniard.

"OK Lacroix, you want a taste? --here it is."  I pushed the sleeve of my shirt back above the elbow, and held the forearm out to Lacroix, vein-side showing.

He raised his eyebrows somewhat delicately.  "Isn't that the limb you... misplaced in that unfortunate crash?"

How could he possibly know that?  "It does seem," he went on gingerly, "to have healed rather nicely.  And thank you, but no," he said.  "Instead, allow me to offer you-- some of my private stock?"

The Raven's private stock is a legend.  Once I tasted it, I knew why.  It was almost alive.

We drank, sitting in chairs like men in a drawing room, for about half an hour.  Lacroix talked straight through; I'd never seen anything like it in his public demeanor.  He brought up gossip, told stories from eras before I was born, mentioned vampires I know only by myth or anecdote, and was altogether the consummate host.

I sat there getting scareder by the minute.

~ ~ ~

When the time came, there was almost no predation about it; more a calm assertion of rightful dominion.  He is not my master; cannot be in my line, or I would feel it.  Yet he rose to his full, rather formidable height, strolled over to me, and lifted me by the chin out of my chair like an owner.

"Hijo de puta!" I said reflexively.  You can take the boy out of the Inquisition, but...  In all these years, I have never had sex with a man.  Never wanted it.

Lacroix released me.  His face contracted with just the smallest beginning of a snarl, then relaxed.  When he spoke, it was in the urbane tones I'd been listening to as we drank.

"-So- unkind to my dear old dam," Lacroix said.  "In fact, she was not.  My daughter, on the other hand, -was- the child of a woman of pleasure.  Quite a fine one, actually."  The corners of his mouth crooked in a tiny smile.

I had the distinct feeling that if he'd chosen to take offense, I would have been dead a few seconds ago.  Now I know where Nick Knight gets his scary side.

Lacroix moved in on me again.  There are, in fact, subtle signs of age among vampires.  Nothing as obvious as tree rings or gray hairs, but at a range of a few millimeters I was beginning to know how old Lacroix really was.  Almost, if not actually, a bona fide Ancient.  It's in the eyes, the skin.

But even that wasn't the full story of his power.  I felt a sense of compulsion, the way I imagine whammied mortals might feel--

--and then his hand came forward to touch my genitals and the beast came out of me at about Mach 2.

I flew at him, hands reaching for his head to break the neck, rip the head away from its body, roaring.  He let me take him aloft, then caught me and bore me down to the floor hard, slamming through some furniture along the way.  I felt the breaking, the splintering, but in the red haze all I could think of was his hands on me, my desire to destroy him.

There was a moment, an angle, a muscle, his neck tilted away from me for an instant, the vein popping out, and I struck.

Hot life....endless life.  Between hatred and lust, I pulled at his throat, ripping immortal blood out of his body faster than I ever drained any human.  I heard my own body rumbling with the pleasure of it, felt his pleasure and amusement--

--his blood told me:  he was in full possession of his senses.  He was giving me this, had given me his throat.

He laughed, and I pulled away snarling, raging at him with reddened teeth.  His eyes gleamed like white fire and a fist caught at my long hair, wrapping it once around his fingers and wrenching my head back.  I fought, I fought even with the power of the blood he'd just surrendered to me, but it was nothing compared with his strength.

Again he slammed me against a surface-- it may have been the ceiling this time-- but now it was he who found a neck to strike.  Although I twisted and left ripped-out hair in his hand, he found his mark, drove his fangs through my skin, and drank.

I heard myself roaring against the penetration.

And then I felt it-- heat like I hadn't known since the kiss of my master, a sensuality mortals can only guess at.  Every cell in your body sings, every thought you have or ever did have becomes saturated in the drunken pleasure of it.

For that instant, I became his, almost as if he'd made me.

Lacroix pulled his mouth away from my neck to shift it to my mouth and I greeted that kiss with a hunger I could not have imagined.  Teeth and tongues tear at each other in a vampire kiss; the mouth fills with mingled blood, the small cuts heal, new ones are made.  He scraped a fang along my gumline and blood sluiced into both our mouths; I drove my fangs through his tongue and he joined me in sucking the few seconds of blood that flowed before the pinpricks healed.

Part of me was hating him through every second.  Yet I wouldn't have stopped if my life had depended on it.

We came to rest somewhere mutually entangled, the first fierce heat of contact sated.  Almost drowsily, I let him undress me, welcomed his hands on my chest, the rough palms that scraped over my nipples, the tongue, and then the tooth that followed, the small lappings at the scores of little cuts...

"Your little mortal toy can -never- give you this," he said.

How--?  the blood, it was in my blood, fresh and bitter-- only a few hours before I'd thought Tracy had come to me as I believe she will:  to ask to be an immortal, to give me her death, take my new life.  This lover I ache for-- Instead she screamed with horror, horror of me, my kind of life.

"Fool," Lacroix said.  "Fool.  -This- is what you are."  His mouth came down on my gut, visited my navel, followed the trail of hairs...

"Such beauty should not be wasted," Lacroix said, "thrown away on those  -transient- shadows... mortals"  His mouth found my cock and I closed my eyes and my mind to anything but that pleasure.  Again he made the tiniest cuts with the very tips of his teeth and drank me even as his lips and tongue inflamed the skin, teased the head, opened to bring his mouth all the way to the base--

And now I stirred, turning to reciprocate, to consume Lacroix as wholly as he had me-- which cannot be done.  I gave him pleasure, I may even have given him much of what he gave me, but there is no knowing Lacroix.  There is no swallowing a knowledge of Lacroix into the blood.

In the end, the last pleasure I could give him was simply to lie there, hair fanning out in every direction, deeply surrendered, deeply sated, and to allow him to know it, as the blood settled, and the outcry of strange voices from his blood dimmed and was absorbed.  He had made me feel the pleasure of my own existence as I had not done-- for a century, I realized.  All that horrified a mortal woman delighted him; the fire, the bloodlust, the killer in me.

More than that, he had taken me deeper into myself, my life.  I had only one night with a master; after that, there was no teacher, no guide.  Lacroix has within him the accumulated subtleties of millennia; he contains a knowledge of his nature, our nature, that I have only inklings of.

He brought me another glass of the private stock to sip at, and settled in to watch me as I drank and reflected.  He had taken the Spanish boy who grew up with the Inquisition, and the vampire who had no lust for men, and made them scream for what he could give.  Something as basic as my nature as a sexual being -- I would have said man, until now -- was altered when my master carried me into this other existence.  Lacroix was right, it was the act of a fool not to know it.  I said as much. 

And then he told me that he would never touch me again.

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