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Someone had been following him for the past three days.

Remington was known, at times, for his moments of paranoia; a reflex born of having not always been an upstanding citizen in a city that had recently cracked down on any and all crime. Bancroft was to blame for that. Remi himself was not exactly a fan of authority, a fact that some probably would have found ironic considering his role in the world. He was an enforcer of the only true law that applied to his kind, not conscripted but a happy and knowing accomplice to the only long-lived police force to have risen out of the darkness since the elders had returned from the Shadow Realm. Much like his other faction-mates, he had his reasons, not the least of which was the instinct native to all living things – to survive.

But the figure that had been stalking him was not some sort of paranoid ideation. He had first noticed it just after having gotten out of hunt. Well no, it hadn’t been a hunt. Apparently the idea had been to take down someone with multiple secrecy violations against her. She had responded by committing suicide. Good for her, fixing her own **** up. Of course, she would just return a short time later, hopefully more careful than before. If not, the whole thing would just be a rinse and repeat job. That was how it felt sometimes. Like there were a select few who just never learned. Or never learned to care. Remi was thankful there hadn’t actually been any fighting when he noticed the car for the first time.

He had taken to traveling by the use of his sports car, the one with enough weapons in the trunk to have supplied a third world genocide. The benefits were obvious, but the draw back was that he could not afford to let the shadows envelop him and make him fade out of sight. He was easier to trail in that way. Upon first realizing, Remi had thought to rectify the situation by simply going back to his old habits. A man or woman could not stalk what they could not see or hear. But he wanted more details, on the off chance that what had happened down in Mexico a short time back was going to come back and bite him in the ***. Not just for him, but for Adelita and Godric as well, who had their own fallout to handle if the cartel had gotten its collective **** together after….well. It had been an eventful new year.

So he let it go on for another couple of days. It was easy enough to seamlessly blend into the human world. He just kept odd hours, but between training his replacement at the dojo, spending time at Adrenaline, and the daily grind of regular workout, and consulting, he was more than a busy boy. He had decided a short time before to begin stepping back from the influence he had on the human world, but that was easier said than done. He kept having to tie up fresh loose ends, which had been the source of some frustration. For once, it was to his benefit, because he could appear normal, even using his own apartment as opposed to resting at the Eyrie.

He made sure there was a bullet in the chamber of his handgun, inspecting for a moment before he stuffed it into his jacket and stepped outside. He crossed the street, and grabbed the handle to a car door so he could firmly wrench the thing open and then slip inside. His gun was drawn and pointed at a man’s temple a second later. The whole thing worked like one fluid sort of motion, and the sound that came from him was vaguely less than pleased. “I don’t know who the **** you’re working for, but you have five seconds to tell me…” A pause as recognition hit him.

“Sterling?”

He had not recognized the other man’s features immediately, likely in part due to the scruff on his face and the fact that it had been at least a decade since the two of them had seen each other. When Remington had picked himself up out of the proverbial ashes after his father had disowned him, he had completely left his old life behind. He hadn’t bothered with keeping in contact with any friends. Newly having reached adulthood, he’d fled from Corpus Christi and had gone immediately north. He wasn’t the sort of man to look back, so he hadn’t. For ten years, he hadn’t regretted the choice he had made, just as he didn’t regret having become a creature of shadow amongst the living and dead.

To say that it was a blast from the past was something of an understatement. He was immediately taken back to high school. His freshman and sophomore year, he had at least had decent attendance. After that point, things had gotten really spotty for him. He’d spent more time locked away than in class, but he recalled his small group of friends, the little niche they had whittled out of the campus. Sterling had always been something of a pariah to the truly social elite because he wasn’t truly one of them. Not that Remington had cared all that much about that sort of thing. He staunchy rejected the belief that one person was better than another just because the station of their birth.

He found, even when he had been a boy, that sort of mentality disgusting.

They had talked a few times, but they had never really been what anyone might have considered close. Remington’s mother had been abjectly opposed to their even knowing each other. Another thing the teen hadn’t really cared about.

“Funny, I could have sworn you’d know what a dick looks like.” He withdrew his gun regardless, even though he took note of the way that a hand slid toward what he assumed was likely a weapon. It was a minor risk, because short of getting his brains splattered on the window and ceiling of the car, there wasn’t much a lone bullet was going to do to stop him down. Annoy him yes. Halt him? Not so much. It was a bridge he would cross if Sterling decided he was going to cross the line.

He wanted to push. Ask how the other man’s own mother was, but that was a relic of the past still buried in his own mind. He had once been an instigator, bellicose **** with very little regard for anyone’s feelings. Time had slowly added some restraint to the viciousness behind his teeth. It was a sticky situation, because the human’s mother was the subject of the scorn Sterling had faced in school. She had not come from amongst their ranks. She had not been wealthy nor had she come from a long and respected line. They were the royalty of the south and she had been a domestic whose ******** boy had been passed off as someone worth the collective time of the haughty aristocracy.

“How is that old whore?“ A pause. The other man was poised. He seemed to handle the barrel of a gun in his face pretty well. Military? Police? There was some kind of history there that vaguely interested him. “I assume she wants something. Probably to do with money. Tell her I don’t have time to deal with her petty problems.”

There was a spark of interest at the other man’s admission, the slow quirking of his black brow, a sharply contrasted mark against flesh as pale and hard as alabaster. There was a glimmer of it in his eyes, hints of heat hidden somewhere behind the cold visage, though it would have taken someone with exceptional observational skills to note those embers. It, at the very least, was permission to inspect the other male more closely without the intention of finding weak spots to potentially exploit. Checking out a guy he hadn’t seen in years? Well, if that wasn’t classic Remington, then nothing was. Of course, the way he studied those features was discrete. He traced over the strong lines of a face with his gaze, which gradually dropped an inch at a time. Sterling had grown more muscular with time, but that was true of them both he supposed.

He stopped when his eyes hit a waist, which was partially due to the other man’s position. Seated, there wasn’t a whole lot for him to enjoy. Too much was closed off, indistinct. None the less, his brow slowly lowered back into place and a rare smile jerked one corner of his mouth into a severe point that showed off the faint glisten of pearly whites. Oh yeah. Sterling Monsivais had grown up nicely, with attractive facial hair, and eyes that looked like the most indulgent of chocolates. Melted, he could almost picture himself lapping at a sweetness similar to them. The expression was not at all human, and likely never had been. Even as a mortal, Remi had been a beast on the prowl when it came to finding potential partners – whether it was for a night or longer. He was a predator by nature, maybe why he had slipped so easily into the role or vampire.

“Maybe when you’re not pointing your gun at me, I’ll show you just how much it isn’t compensation.” His tone was even enough that it easily could have been a legitimate offer. Another problem that Remington had. Apparently the threat of death or bodily harm was not exactly a turn off to him. On the contrary, it only seemed to fan those embers all the more, not that anyone would have immediately known that. One of the side effects of being such a rigidly controlled figure was that he was often just plain inscrutable. That’s what made it dangerous to play games with him, because he rarely gave warning before he was ready to snap. One moment he generally appeared to be fine, and the next, someone pushed him over the edge and he was beating the **** out of them with very little concern for whether or not they lived through the ordeal. In the past, this had been true, even of people he’d cared about.

His gun was holstered in his jacket finally and he fully twisted, his back resting against the door he had come in through. His leg was drawn up onto the seat, his knee bumping into the center console – the curse of having long legs, it seemed. He was never ‘comfortable’ in a car unless they were Texas sized, no matter how far he pushed his seat back, because his legs always felt cramped, shoved up against glove compartment. “I could ask the same. Tell me you didn’t lose the ***.” It was crass, but Remi had gotten out of a relationship a short time back. When he’d been with Fable, he had refused to even look at anyone else, much less flirt with them. But it seemed, he took to it like a fish to water. “I remember it being my favorite part of Ms. Guarnaschelli’s class.” The class in which Sterling had been seated immediately in front of him. Of course, he’d never expressed his appreciation before, mainly because a boy with certain inclinations in the South had to be very careful with who he told. He wasn’t and never would be a flamboyant creature, but many people could be close-minded, and children were especially cruel.

He hadn’t come out as openly bisexual until he’d moved away from home, and basically completely rewritten his life from the ground up.

A snort at the description of his mother. She had not-so-openly fucked around on his father for years. Not that Remi entirely blamed her. Old Mr. Rothfelder had been in his late fifties when they had gotten married. She had been a gold digger, and he had wanted an heir to the massive fortune he’d amassed. After Remington had been born, he’d basically ignored her in favor of returning to her business affairs. He hadn’t even tried to meet her needs, and Remi was fairly certain he hadn’t cared about her indiscretions. There was one in particular the vampire knew all too well his father had ignored for years.

The door locks clicked into place and his expression went briefly wry, as if to ask whether or not Sterling was serious. But it seemed that he was. Remi easily could have smashed a window and been out the door in a moment. Or he could have snapped the other guy’s neck and just discarded him somewhere. But he knew his mother, and while she was a whore, she was a tenacious whore. If her cash was on the line, she wasn’t going to stop until it was secured. It behooved the vampire to at least try and work with her if it meant he could walk away without having to deal with her in the future.

But **** Sterling.

He hated having his choices made for him.

“Yeah sure. But if we’re going south of the border, we’re going to do it my way, and I at least need to pack a bag.” He nodded towards his apartment a moment later as if to emphasize his point. “This a rental or your car? I don’t like it, we’re taking mine.” Which was, in part, because his sports car had been gift from Velveteen. He drove it when he left town to remind him what he had to return home to. There was also the fact that its trunk was filled with weapons. Always helpful.

Well wasn’t that delicious. Maybe it was because Remington had intentionally surrounded himself in his life with people who could hold their own in a fight, but he appreciated the natural way that Sterling seemed to have taken up a defensive posture. When he had been younger, the native Texan had been drawn to anything and everything fatally dangerous. Since having reached adulthood, he seemed to have been just plain attracted to people who turned out to be deadly in their own right. Like minds maybe. Though if he were being honest with himself, the last person he might have suspected of having a lethal edge was the very creature seated before him. Maybe it was that juxtaposition of the nerdy kid he had known against the steel jawed man Sterling had become that had the lamp of Remi’s intrigue lit.

It was unexpected, but in the best possible way. Or as much as one might view another person aiming a gun at them.

But then, Remington never had been quite stable in that sense. Most of his connections in the modern day knew him to be rigidly controlled, silent to a fault. Only a few had seen the gully washer of extreme emotion that brewed beneath the surface or the way it occasionally impelled him towards doing things that might not always have been considered particularly bright. “Unfortunate.” He said, though he didn’t specify exactly the nature of the comment. He was a creature of few spoken words. Most of his communication was entirely non-verbal. Another thing that he appreciated about Sterling, the way that the man seemed to have developed the skill to decrypt what Remi was thinking. Not that it was particularly difficult in that instance. Not when his appraisal was so open. But it was that skill that would do the other man service on their trip back to the States.

“Oohrah.” He said, though the tone was flat and unenthusiastic. Though just because the other man may have attended the Marine Military Academy as a preparation to join the Corp – did not actually mean he’d joined afterwards. Even that was an assumption. The Academy took in boys from 8th grade through a year of post-graduate training. Really by the time that Remington had ‘checked out’ of school had been after Freshmen year. Had he even seen the other boy after that point? He was vaguely unsettled that he didn’t know, though he made those feelings no more visible than he did any others.

Though that did explain a lot. Remington’s own sculpted body had been earned largely through the gym and his time on the MMA circuit. He had picked up some popularity, even won a few titles before having pulled out so that he could train other young hopefuls. Some people had made the claim he’d gotten out of the game too soon, others had just attributed it to the scandal. His manager had told him that after nearly killing a man in the ring two times in as many years that if he didn’t bow out while he could, he was going to get forced out. He’d taken the advice, and had paid others to make his troubles in that part of his life go away. He hadn’t really wanted to retreat though, and that was how it had felt. Like he was running away. The reason he’d joined an underground fighting circle – there was more freedom there.

“That and I usually showed up to class drunk, or got drunk in class.” Which had been surprisingly common for the crowd he had run with in those days. They had been allowed to bring water to school and drink it from the bottle so a lot of them just swapped it out with vodka, thinking they were hot **** for having pulled one over on their instructors. School itself had not been high on Remi’s list of priorities. He almost wanted to tell the other man that he would be the judge of just how well that body part had faired. He didn’t though, choosing instead to peer more intently into his would-be captor’s eyes. There was something less than human there. But there always was with Remington. Usually it was buried deeply, but he sometimes let it float closer to the surface, that wild bellicose monster inside that craved blood and called for death.

He moved almost instantaneously. He didn’t even bother to let the other man finish. One moment he lay sprawled across one seat and the next his knee was on the center console, and the other was pressed into an abdomen with the fingers of one hand tangled in hair to sharply jerk hair back. He had to bow his back and even then his head hit the top of the car. He stared down into eyes, his passive features having taken on a scowl. “Let me make something clear here. I said that I would go with you. Push me further, and you will not enjoy how I respond.” He hadn’t bothered to disarm the other man. And if he had been part of the Marines, chances were that Sterling would have been able to tell that Remi moved several times the speed any person should have been able to. Nearly at a blur.

He continued to tug until veins bulged on the side of a neck and he could feel saliva pooling in his mouth. ****. And then he processed the rest of what the other man said, and looked briefly sheepish, a rare show of remorse on his part for possibly having made a fool of himself. He released, though he didn’t want to – and that had nothing to do with anger. Or maybe it did. One of the problems with repressing emotion was that they tended to mix together in a violent cocktail. Rage. Desire. Both of them were there in one form or another. Those and apologetic disdain. Would Sterling try to fight him? He almost wanted the man too, so that he had an excuse to pin him to a door and sink his fangs in.

He dropped back into his seat, sitting correctly. He even reached for a seatbelt. “You know the way. You can come in with me if you really want.” And then a brow lifted to the news of a warrant. It was…entirely possible. Improbable, but possible. He didn’t bother to acknowledge either way. If things went south, nobody would ever find Sterling’s body.

Remington wanted to comment to the other man, that he vastly overestimated how crushing the disappointment really was, but chose not to both because it seemed pointlessly catty and because he was somewhat upset. Silence was the option he chose, one that he often returned to when it came to conversation. And then he was hopelessly disarmed by a lone word. Cute. Nobody had called him that in years, if only because the connotation tended to make people think of fuzzy warm things, two observations which would have proven false if applied to Remington. He chuckled softly, the sound low and percussive, like someone was slowly hammering against a large, hollow drum. It punched at the air, a shadow boxer fighting the ear drums.

“I think we both know that’s not true.” Remi had not been particularly discreet with his sexual endeavours as a young man, something that held true through his adult life. While he wasn’t a needless braggart, he wasn’t shy when it came to describing things, and hadn’t believed in sleeping with young women who wanted to keep their little rendezvous private. Though it had not stopped a few of them, usually girls with boyfriends, from attempting to entice him into an empty classroom or into something dirty at the parties he liked to attend (or throw). But he didn’t want to live in the past. That was a little too much like the highschool all-star who held onto his jersey ten or more years after graduation. Life had not really started for Remington until he’d gotten away from his home and experienced true freedom or the first time.

By the time that he was settling back into his seat, there was this undercurrent of static in the air, somewhere in the background. It was indistinct, white noise of blood rushing through his system. He almost did not hear the lapse in Sterling’s phrase because he needed to get himself under control and curb the instinct to try and crush the other man’s windpipe with his bare hand. His hand tightened into a fist until he heard a pop of the bones unsettling in their joints. He stopped to just one side of actually cracking the bone out of place before a breath brought another colour to his vision than red. He replayed the words in his head a couple of times before allowing a faint smile. “I’d be happy to set that up for you.” He attempted not to sound too smug, but there was this undeniable stirring in him that came from the feeding of his bloodlust, the promise of violence, and something…else.

The short road trip to his apartment was enough for him to fully regain the control that had just briefly slipped, and then a gun was being pressed along his jaw. He wanted to tell the other man to **** off. Not because of the gun. Because Sterling had opened the door for him. Like he was some sort of common bit—date, who needed to have things done for him. He very nearly said something unreasonable, but became immediately distracted by the way teeth dug into his flesh. There was the sharp promise of pain, though it went largely unfulfilled, and what sensation did rise from the action immediately fled south so that it could settle in his groin. Okay. He could tolerate having his door open. ******* fine then. A hiss escaped him as he sat there for a moment, no stunned but very aware that he needed to adjust his pants and was not about to do so while Sterling was watching.

When the other man was out of the car, a hand lowered to fix the mild discomfort before he pulled up and out of the vehicle so that his stride could carry him across the street towards his apartment. He ended up stopping short at the door that led into the main lobby so that he could hold it open for the other man. And firmly planted himself in that spot, refusing to move until Sterling made his way through. Hot ********.

From there, he only just barely made it to the elevator before his hand decided to wander away from his jacket pockets, one of them sliding across the space between the pair of them and settle rather pointedly on a backside. Tame at first, he tightened his grip, without leaning even nominally closer. Oh yeah. It was still good. “Had to check for myself.” He said a second later. The contraption dinged and the doors slid open for them so that he could lead the way to his door. A key went into the lock and then he pushed his way inside. His apartment was mostly done in color block with bold colors on different walls. Very modern by way of furniture and design. They entered into a living space, a kitchen and eat-in space immediately in view.

It was not particularly spacious, and long legs provided an almost immediate transition from the front door to the entrance of his bedroom. His hand caught on the frame as he half turned to look to the other man. “You going to watch me pack my bags?” He asked, unsure of just how thorough his new companion wanted to be. If so, Remi fully intended to make things as awkward as he possibly could. Just how many condoms could he fit into a travel bag? “Make sure to close the door behind you.” And with that, went to his closet so he could begin to pull things together.