How I Met:

my first murder mystery

thebluefrenchhorn

"It's not like I'm condemning you to babysitting for an eternity," Hariel reasoned, pulling her thick curls into an uneven spiral on the crown of her head.

"That's what you said the last time," Damon responded in kind, arms crossed and scowl marring his otherwise handsome features. The emotion in his eyes, for once, as icy as their color.

"I know what I said." Hariel waved her hand dismissively, moving to pick up jacket with her other. "But, this will the last time. I need to sort out my affairs before I can address whatever is going on with you."

She gestured dully to Damon's figure before spinning on her heel and the vampire just raised an eyebrow. "I'll hold you to that, Baby Death. I'll hold you to that."

The sharp crack of a gunshot rung through Hariel's small apartment. Glancing up, Damon leisurely stretched his arms above him, wincing as his muscles groaned in protest. It took a lot for a vampire to relax—their reflexes honed to react at the drop of a pin—so he wasn't complaining.

That didn't make Hariel's couch any more comfortable though.

Not to mention the fact that the woman had begun saddling him with longer and longer babysitting shifts. Brat-sitting may have been slowly growing on him (not that he would ever mention that little fact to the red-haired harpy and her turquoise menace), but not enough to warrant the accelerated rates of bonding time he was being subjected to.

Of course, it was that very same woman's fault that he was in this predicament to begin with. She hoarded her precious information over his head, giving out bite-sized pieces of it like treats. She couldn't be compelled either. Damon had found that out the hard way.

Summarily put, he was bitter. Frustrated enough that his internal monologue had taken precedent over properly verifying Hariel's arrival. Maybe he had grown complacent the last few weeks, adjusting to the witch's seemingly endless supply of blood bags as he attempted to appease her. Personally, her preferred drinking from the source, but he had quickly realized that Hariel had eyes everywhere, that between her celebrity status (and, boy, had that been difficult to wrap his head around: a war having just drawn to a close that more than half the world didn't even know about) and her apparent status as Death, nothing slipped past her.

So, he had been a good, little vampire, cleaned his fangs, and abstained from performing any dastardly deeds on misplaced bar hoppers. He had babysat her brat when she requested and didn't disrupt her wards. He had been, quite frankly, a reasonably upstanding citizen for the first time in over a century and Hariel repaid him by ditching for five days? Damon was definitely annoyed and he wasn't afraid to let his pseudo-employer know.

"Oh, well look who's finally back," he bit out, his hand fisted in the shirt of Teddy Lupin, demon child extraordinaire, as the little bugger attempted to bolt towards Hariel's regular teleportation-thingy (what had she called it? Appa-whatever?) spot. "Back from your Vegas vacation so soon? I was afraid Theodore and I were going to have to begin settling for rations."

His tone was snarky, inviting a response and when one didn't come, he froze, recognizing for the first time that evening that the apartment was far too quiet. His heart froze in his chest for a millisecond.

Something was very very wrong.

It was the scent that hit him first. Heady, metallic, and intertwined with the dampness of sweat, Damon knew it couldn't be anything but blood. He clenched his jaw, elongated canines digging into his lips as he felt the rush of angry veins, sharp blue lines stark against the paleness of his skin, creeping down his face. His breath was shallow, excitement thrumming just beneath his skin like a well-tuned guitar and he knew it would be so easy, so very easy to sink his fangs into the slender column of the woman's neck.

Before they were people, vampires were predators, the transition jumping a rung in the ladder of evolution that simply couldn't be reversed. For better or for worse, they were the other, opposite of what had once been, creatures of the night bringing humans like cattle to the slaughter. They were hardwired to be killers, big cats with little hope of being domesticated, and vampires who failed to acknowledge their fundamental instincts snapped. Rippers, the whole lot of them.

But Damon wasn't a ripper, not like Stefan.

He knew what he was: the good, the bad, the ugly, when eternity without Katherine barely seemed worth living. He wasn't foolish enough to view himself as anything other than the murder machine on steroids that vampire society amounted to.

He continued to inhale in short bursts, head tucked into the collar of his shirt like it was a makeshift gas mask. He wasn't stupid. He knew that taking a deep breath would be self-control suicide. The air felt heavy, the hazy stench of fear clinging to the room, rising off the downed figure before him and the werewolf pup nipping at his heels.

"Vacate the premises, Cujo," he barked out, swinging his head around to Teddy and, fuck, the brat's eyes were werewolf gold. That complicated things. "You don't need to see this."

A rumbling growl echoed in response, Teddy's lips curled back and his eyes blown wide with incomprehension as if he wasn't aware that he could even emit such a sound. He probably wasn't, what with Hariel's mother hen tendencies preventing the pint-sized menace from being within even a mile of danger. That was some grade A parenting—hell, Damon wished his old man had been a bit more like that and bit less enthusiastic about dropkicking him into a national war—but, it didn't help right now, not when Hariel was bleeding out right before them.

Damon knew what it looked like: him, a larger predator, crouched over the pup's adoptive mother as she held onto a fraying thread of life. He understood the brat's aggression. Warning bells wouldn't just be going off in his head if that was him, they would he blaring.

It didn't matter, though. All the sympathy in the world wouldn't fix this, not when Damon couldn't do jack squat with a werewolf, half or not, ready to bite him at a moment's notice.

"I said get, brat." He flashed dark eyes at the trembling figure below him.

"No." There was a look of defiance wrapped around the pup. Golden eyes sharp despite shaking limbs, hair uncontrollably skipping through the rainbow like a defective kaleidoscope, and tear tracks staining cheeks lined with baby fat. "I'm not leaving Hari. Not when she needs me. Not now. Not ever."

"That's a great pep talk, kid. Really moving. Almost brought tears to my eyes and everything," Damon responded, voice sharp with irritation. "But unless you're prepared for season two of the orphan lifestyle, you're going to have to let the adult handle this."

He emphasized the word adult, angrily jabbing a thumb towards his own torso as he spoke. His frustration was palpable, vampiric features emerging with more prominence than before. Previously, he had taken care to box up the monster, lest he terrify Teddy. Now, with his patience fraying at an alarming rate, he found that he cared significantly less. You're out of your league, twerp, Damon thought, lips curling upwards to expose his fangs. Now go ahead and runaway with your tail between your legs like a good, little brattling.

Any sane individual would have fled. No one of sound mind would wait around to get snapped in two like a discarded twig. Even Damon (although he would never admit it, no matter how much Hariel would eventually tease him) had fled from his own fair share of older vamps. Except, that didn't happen.

Difying all logic, the pup took one look at his morphing features and decided a full frontal attack was his best option. Without a second thought, he launched himself towards Damon, his body flailing wildly in a ball of limbs that hadn't quite figured out what to do. It was utterly pathetic, idiotic, and the exact reason why Damon refused to fraternize with werewolves.

Vampires were easy to manage. When in doubt, one could assume that they would always default to acting in their own best interest. Werewolves didn't work like that. They were clingy creatures, strangely loyal, and could be set off at a drop of a pin. It was, quite frankly, a bucket of crazy that he had no interest in dealing with.

The kid had balls of steel. Damon could give him that. Not that it was going to prevent him from punting the little menace out of the room, because that's what it was going to come down to in the end: the werewolf brat charging straight at him to only be knocked out with a simple flick of his wrist. It was really too easy.

"I hope you like naps, kid."

One werewolf brat down and Hariel passed out before him, Damon could feel the panic truly begin to sink in. He knew it was a stupid decision to knockout Teddy, questionable at best, but he had lost his cool and now he was just hoping he hadn't given the little menace brain damage. Fuck, Hariel was going to kill him if she ended up surviving this.

Which brought him to his more pressing concern: Hariel's soon-to-be corpse, the color draining out of her pallid skin at an alarming rate. Her body was laid at an awkward angle, head lolling to the side with eyes closed in pain. He couldn't have her die on him, not when there was still so much she had yet to divulge to him. Not when she provided the most entertainment he had experienced in decades. A dead Hariel meant back to "Stefan Stalking" as his main source of entertainment and Damon couldn't handle that. Stefan was, for all intents and purposes, one of the most boring individuals known to vampiric kind.

Even worse than that, however, was possibility of being saddled with guardianship of Hariel's half-werewolf ward. Damon didn't know much about the redhead's social circle, the witch keeping most of her personal affairs under lock and key when she was around him, but there had better be someone else in her life that could take care of that little menace. That was a fate worse than death.

Desperately, he bit into his wrist, faintly registering the pain as he shoved it before Hariel's open mouth. "Drink, please, just drink."

He didn't want to turn her, couldn't imagine the type of anger that she would feel if he accidentally did so against her will, but he had no other options. Damon wasn't a healer. In fact, he had spent the majority of his life excelling in the exact opposite, cultivating a unique skillset of killing individuals in a variety of different ways. The notion of him existing as anything other was laughable.

But, vampire blood could heal. For some unknown reason, beings as cursed and twisted as the monsters held within children's fairytales, could bring someone back from the brink of death with nothing more than a crimson drop. Life could be given from those who were intended to take it. Damon knew that, had experienced it himself all those years ago with Katherine. If transitioning was the price to pay for Teddy not losing his second mother, than so be it.

"Drink, Baby Death. Just a little drop, that's all you need." Damon urged, his wrist pushed further into the small woman's face, her mouth slack-jawed and unresponsive. His voice was laced with annoyance, frustrated that Hariel would even consider putting him in this situation. Beneath that, his chest ached, soft and barely noticeable, but there nonetheless.

He didn't want her to die and while a large part of it was certainly the result of his twisted self-interest, his hapless search for the vampiric El Dorado that was Katherine Pierce (for who else would be capable of freeing his lost love, but Death wrapped in a mortal cloak?), Damon couldn't ignore the sliver of it all that clung on for Hariel, herself, and nothing more.

His hands, coated in crusting ribbons of blood, and his face buried against his chest, nose scrunched, Damon knew this was different. It wasn't that he liked Hariel. But, he didn't dislike her either. She was, well, tolerable, a happy medium that he hadn't settled upon for decades.

Not a friend, but not an enemy: something lying within that grey area and fuck, if Damon was going to give that up so quickly after finding it.

But, that didn't matter. The redhead wasn't breathing, his blood dripping uselessly down her throat. It's supposed to heal you. That's what vampire blood does, Damon thought, struck by an unfamiliar cord of dispair. Why isn't it working? What am I doing wrong?

He clenched his teeth, free hand shooting out to punch the floorboard, wooden paneling breaking beneath it with a distinctive crunch.

"Wake up," he shouted, not bothering to hide his anger, spittle sliding down his face as ripped it free of the confines of his thin shirt. The scent of blood, all the more stronger, washed over him and Damon found that he didn't care, not when his hopes of reaching Katherine were once again destroyed, crumbling away as they always did. "Dear God, just please wake up."

Only silence answered him.

One minute passed.

Then another.

And then Hariel was sitting up with a gasp, choking on his blood.

Author's Note: Buffed up some earlier chapters to provide more insight for the characters reasoning. More importantly, though, Teddy Lupin deserves a hug.