second chunk

[maderr]

*~*~*~*

He'd never stayed anywhere for more than a couple of days. The fact that he'd been in Peter's house for almost two weeks now was weird, overwhelming, and thrilled him to no end. He was even establishing a routine, which was the coolest thing ever. A bedtime, a breakfast time, a lunch time, dinner time, watch Peter and Sally try to kill each other time (usually once the sun went down all bets were off).

Jordan was cool. He wasn’t as good as his wife at resisting sunlight - even the moon bothered him some - so he usually just played recluse. Though he occasionally participated in his wife's and Peter's antics, generally he was just a spectator and victim-by-association. He'd come over Lowell's third day in residence, while he'd been happily drinking yet another cup of coffee - which Peter had taken to gently teasing him about.




The door opened like the vampire had every right to just walk in. "So you're the one she won't shut up about." Jordan had neat, sandy blonde hair and dark brown eyes, and the unnaturally pale skin that few vampires actually had. He was dressed in jeans, a black and blue, long sleeved flannel shirt worn open over a black t-shirt. His black work boots were clean and looked like they were rarely worn. "Lowell, right?"

Lowell nodded, "Aren't you going to get in trouble for being here?"

"Only if I get caught or you tell on me," Jordan winked. "I just came to say hello to Petey's new boyfriend."

Sally always said such things whenever she dropped by - or was yelling at Peter in her yard. Lowell was getting used to it, though he still didn't get why they thought that. "I'm not."

"Not what?" Jordan asked.

"His boyfriend," Lowell hoped he wasn't blushing, but could feel that he was.

Jordan just grinned and helped himself to some coffee. "So how do you like it so far? In Midsummer's Night?"

"It's nice," Lowell said with a shrug.

"Meaning you haven't left the house?" Jordan replied with a laugh.

Lowell frowned, "I didn't think it was a good idea for me to just wander into town. Don't know where to go anyway."

"You should get out more," Jordan advised. "If you say you're living with the doc, no one will inquire further." Folding his arms, he leaned forward over the table, eager to talk. "Midsummer is what you'd call an interesting town. Small towns always have their secrets. Midsummer's secret is a good number of its residents. All kinds of us. Town lets us live here, and we keep the less desirable 'creatures of the night'" a snort at the words, "from coming in and causing real trouble. Sally's family has lived here for years. We met when I was passing through - been here ever since." Jordan smiled fondly as he spoke of his wife. "In fact the only thing perpetually missing from our odd population is werewolves. We used to have a family of them…" Jordan shrugged. "But not anymore, sadly. You're the first one to show up in almost two years."

That was no surprise. For all that vampires drank human blood, they didn't turn into monsters and run wild upon occasion, nor did their bite inflict vampirism upon their victim. Even if the stupid ass movies said otherwise. People tended to get sick of werewolves pretty fast. "What happened to the other one? And the family?"

"You'll have to ask ol' Petey sometime."

"Oh."

Jordan rose and deposited his mug in the dishwasher. "The old lady bid me ask the two of you to dinner next week. Do you like spaghetti?"

"Umm…sure. I mean I like spaghetti. But I don't know if we can come. Won't Peter say no?"

A laugh, "Probably. But he'll come anyway. He loves Sally's spaghetti. She makes the best sauce, even when we have to cook the meat and leave most of the blood out for him. Humans are so picky about what they eat. Hope you like garlic, Sal is rather religious about the stuff. She'd put it in everything if I let her." Jordan grinned, then looked towards the hallway as the sound of a door opening caught their ears. "Better go. Tuesday, about 3:00 am."

"Okay." Lowell might have though the hours strange, except that he was growing used to the weird hours Peter and his neighbors kept.

With a wave, Jordan was gone.




Nearly two weeks and Lowell knew all kinds of stuff now about Jordan and Sally, and from them stuff about various neighbors and friends in town that he would 'probably meet eventually.'

He had the house memorized, having had not much else to do but explore it. The ground floor was relatively large, mostly because the front half was taken over by offices - a front room and an examination room. Peter's patients were infrequent, business light enough that he didn't require an assistant to help him run things. They also came at the strangest hours, seeking treatment for ailments no human would ever have - or humans with a problem a normal doctor couldn't cure.

Lowell rapidly learned two things. The first was that Peter was highly thought of by the entire town. He often watched the patients coming and going, the way they thanked Peter and hugged him and pressed gifts upon him when they couldn't pay in money.

Which was the second thing he learned. Peter didn't make much money. Enough to get by, certainly the doctor wasn't in any danger of going poor. But he wasn't very far from it. The things he needed to fix the peculiar problems that came his way were not cheap or easily obtained.

But those were the only things he'd been able to learn, other than that apparently everyone in town was curious about the new werewolf - but not pestering him at Peter's request. The doctor teased him about it sometimes when they ate.

"I think you're the whole reason I've been so busy in the office lately," Peter said with a smile. "They keep hoping to catch a glimpse of you."

Lowell swallowed a bite of fried chicken, licking grease and crumbs from his lips. "Why? I'm not that interesting."

"Werewolves aren't common around here, even if everything else is."

"Werewolves aren't common anywhere."

Peter looked sad for a moment, something that Lowell noticed happened whenever the subject of werewolves came up. "There used to be a family, once."

Biting his lip, setting his chicken down, Lowell hesitated and then made himself ask. "Jordan said the same thing--"

"Still mad he just walked in. We have dinner with them tomorrow don't we? I'm sorry - go ahead."

Lowell shook his head, "Jordan said the same thing - about a family of werewolves. He said I should ask you about them." Immediately Lowell ducked his head and stared hard at his chicken and gravy-soaked mashed potatoes - Peter had bought them dinner in town - waiting for Peter to get mad and tell him not to ask again.

Because even though he knew the neighbors, knew the house and the yard and even a lot of the local gossip - apparently the ghost on Mulberry Street was doing quite the naughty things with the mayor after hours - he knew almost nothing about Peter.

Peter spent most of his time either helping the occasional patient or in his lab. He caught short naps at random intervals and never slept for more than three hours at a time. No matter what he was doing, he looked neat and proper and was almost always in his white lab coat. He loved coffee as much as Lowell did, liked to eat chicken. Lowell had never seen his room - though it would be easy enough to sneak in and look around - or his lab. Though Peter probably wouldn't care, the two places had always felt strangely off limits in his mind.

Of Peter's family, other friends, connection with the bastard werewolf Stacey - and man if he ever saw that jerk again he was going to smash his face in. His reasons for trying to find a cure for werewolves?

Lowell knew nothing. It bothered him. But he couldn't fix the problem without being ruder than he was already being by freeloading off the guy.

"Jordan and Sally need to keep their mouths shut," Peter grumbled. He sighed, "It's not really a terrible secret or anything - I just don't talk about it much. The missing werewolf family was mine."

"What!" Lowell jerked his head up. "But - you're not a werewolf."

"No, I'm not." Bitterness and resignation flickered across Peter's face, before he gave another sigh and refilled his glass of iced tea. "My mother was, and she passed it on to my brother. Our father died when I was young. I once had an aunt, uncle and cousins here as well.

The words 'what happened' danced on Lowell's lips, begging to be asked. But he couldn't, not when Peter's eyes went all dark like that. They only did that when he was upset - usually when he had a particularly difficult patient or some mysterious experiment in his lab did not go his way.

Peter answered the unspoken question. "One of my cousins hadn't been born a werewolf."

Lowell winced. Most werewolves were born that way. Disease, natural state, curse - the debates ever raged as to what it actually was. But most who knew more than what Hollywood told them knew that werewolves were the only ones who could inflict their state on others.

All it took was one deep bite. And the bitten ones seldom stayed sane. They couldn't take it, body and mind too used to being human to be able to cope with something that seemed, to them, hideously unnatural. "He went crazy?"

"Yeah, she did" Peter corrected softly. "My mom tried to calm her, stop her, and in the end had to kill her. But my cousin was pretty vicious by that point and they both wound up dieing. Afterwards, her family moved away. They couldn't bear to stay."

Something was weird. Lowell realized what it was, "What about your brother?" He instantly regretted asking - Peter had never looked that upset before. "Sorry…" he said softly.

"It's all right," Peter said softly. "You couldn't know, and you have every right to ask."

"Not really," Lowell argued. "I'm just being nosy."

Peter laughed, and Lowell felt a bit better. "My brother and I no longer get along, in part because of what happened to my cousin. He left when my relatives did. I've not heard from any of them since."

Ouch. Suddenly Lowell realized that life could be a lot worse than his. He'd always thought he'd had it bad, what with the whole no family and the orphanage people mostly scared of him and the aimless wandering. At least he'd never really had anything to lose.

That certainly explained why Lowell treated him like he was perfectly normal. Why it didn't bother him at all to live with a werewolf - and why he was trying to find a cure. He still didn't know who Stacey was, but Lowell couldn't bring himself to ask any more questions - and it was obvious that Stacey was an unpleasant topic.

"Thanks for dinner," he said instead.

Smiling, eyes slowly lightening in color, Peter nodded and gathered up their dishes. "Thank the makers of fast food. All I did was pay for it."

"S'more than I did," Lowell muttered.

"None of that," Peter rolled his eyes.

"I wish you'd let me do something. I don't do anything - not even pay for food and stuff."

Peter rolled his eyes again, "You keep the house from being empty. I detest living alone." He hesitated, pushing his glasses up his nose. "I was alone for years after my brother left - no where else to go, really. I took boarders from time to time, but that was all. Then Stacey arrived…" a hundred different emotions flickered for a too-brief instant across his face. "He was with me for more than five years. But he left two years ago. I've hated it." He smiled weakly at Lowell, "You keep me company, even if you don't realize it. I grew up with werewolves; they're what I know. It feels unnatural not to have one around. If you want to go, certainly you may. Don't feel like you must stay. But if you do stay, don't feel like an imposition or something. That just makes me feel bad, and there's no sense in either of us feeling that way. Okay?"

Unable to speak, Lowell settled for bobbing a nod. He felt fingers lightly tousle his hair, brush his cheek, and then Peter was gone. Lowell lifted his own fingers to his cheek, which felt hot where Peter had touched it.

*~*~*~*

"I just want to make it clear that I am here under heavy protest and you're going to pay dearly for making me suffer."

Sally beamed, "Darling, don't worry. I always give my victims a last meal."

"You mean the last thing you do is make them your meal."

"Semantics, darling" Sally replied airily. Glass beads winked in the profusion of candlelight carefully arranged throughout their house, a dark rainbow of color against her oddly restrained black silk blouse. More of the beads were woven into her elaborately French-braided hair. Beckoning them inside, she gave Lowell a peck on the cheek and then bared her fangs at Peter.

Peter sneered back, the candlelight reflecting off his glasses and giving him the look of the 'Mad Scientist' that Sally maintained he was.

Jordan motioned for Lowell to follow him, dropping a companionable arm across his shoulders. "I think I'd be jealous of the way she gives him so much attention," he winked. "But I know for a fact ol' Petey has no such interest and my wife is more than content to keep me around. My only real concern is that one day they're going to kill all of us trying to do each other in."

Looked twisted his head to look back over his shoulder, where Sally and Peter were already launching into a heated argument complete with hand gestures. "Why do they do that?"

Jordan grinned, "I think when they saw each other they each found the sibling they never had and always wanted. Or something equally sappy but true. Sal's sister is pretty straight laced so they're not terribly close. And Petey's brother…" he trailed off, clearly not certain what he should say.

"He left right? After what happened to their cousin."

A raised eyebrow, "He told you?"

"Only a little bit."

Their conversation was cut short as the other two finally joined them.

"I hope you cooked the meat this time," Peter glared at Sally. "And didn't clean the grocery store out of garlic."

Sally sniffed, offended. "If you can't say something nice, then be quiet."

"Going to be a quiet meal for once, then! Since I'm assuming that goes for you as well, sweetheart." Jordan snickered as they glared at him, and turned to Lowell. "How are you on wine? Zifandel all right?"

"Umm…I'll try anything once?"

Peter rolled his eyes, "Please don't say that sort of thing around them. Are you old enough to drink wine?"

"I think so," Lowell said, trying to look nonchalant.

Sally paused in the process of fetching the wine, looking at the werewolf. "You don't know when you were born?"

"Oh, do be quiet Sally." Peter's eyes flashed. "You're upsetting him."

"How cute, you're getting possessive already."

"Sally!"

Laughing, Sally vanished into the kitchen. She returned a moment later, precariously balancing a bottle of wine and four wine glasses.

"Here, sweetheart. Let me help you."

Sally waved her husband off, "I've got it, I've got it." She motioned them to the living room, making the guests take the leather loveseat while she and Jordan took the couch. "Here, darling" she handed the wine to Jordan. "You can open it."

Lowell's face scrunched after his first sip, and he frowned warily at the tall, skinny glass half full of wine. This was what people made such a fuss over? He took another cautious sip. It wasn't too bad - but it wasn't too good either.

"Don't worry. We can have beer later and forget this sissy stuff the bloodsuckers favor."

"Philistine," Sally sniffed.

"What does that mean?" Lowell asked, feeling stupid.

Peter rolled his eyes, smiling. "It means not only is she a bloodsucker, she's a snotty bloodsucker."

"It means I have taste and you don't, Mad Scientist."

Lowell looked from one to the other and then at Jordan. "I thought married couples were supposed to bicker."

His words were enough that Jordan nearly spilled his wine laughing, "Oh, good lord. The very thought terrifies me!"

"Can we eat so I can go home?" Peter asked, finishing his wine in one gulp and grimacing.

Sally looked disgusted, "That's no way to treat a good wine!"

"There's no such thing as a good wine."

A short chiming ring called to them from the kitchen, and Jordan rose to his feet. "Dinner time." He held out his arm to Sally, who took it and led the way to the dining room.

Peter trailed behind with Lowell, "Having any fun so far?"

"It's funny watching you two go at each other. The wine is okay."

"Beer is better, trust me." He winked, indicating Lowell should precede him into the dining room. "But I do admit her food is very, very good."

"Of course it is," Sally agreed, but beamed at the compliment all the same. She grinned, baring her fangs again. "And we're having more wine with it." The bickering and chatting continued as she served the spaghetti and they passed around a bowl of salad.

Lowell had to admit it was lots better than even the stuff Peter bought for them, and that rated pretty high on his Good Food list. He ate with relish, more than content to eat while the other three nibbled and talked, only half listening. And ignoring the gravy bowl full of red stuff that Sally and Jordan poured into their own spaghetti sauce.

"So how are your experiments going? He doesn't look like he's suffering as much as Stacey sometimes did…"

Peter frowned and shook his head, "I'm not doing those anymore. I never should have started them to begin with. Weren't you the one who said it had all the chance of turning lead to gold?"

"I was…" Sally frowned, genuinely unhappy. "That was just me teasing you, Petey. There's no reason for you to give up."

Jordan nodded, agreeing with his wife. "Isn't that why you've kept him?"

"No," Peter said sharply. "It's not. I don't let people live with me just so I can coerce them into being lab rats."

Lowell lost interest in his spaghetti, "What experiments? Do you mean…" he trailed off. Thinking about it was still hard to do without getting upset.

"Yes, that's what they're talking about." All of Peter's good humor had vanished. "And they'd better stop."

"We're sorry, Peter." Jordan spoke quietly, toying with the stem of his wine glass. "We made an assumption that we shouldn't have."

Peter sighed, "It's all right. The subject is ever a sore point with me."

Playing with a piece of lettuce, Lowell worked up the nerve to speak. "Why did you stop working on it?"

"Jeez, those eyes pack a wallop" Jordan muttered, pouring himself and Sally more wine. They waited for Peter to answer.

Sighing in defeat, shooting a quick, nasty glare at Sally - who pretended not to see it - Peter shoved his plate aside and looked at Lowell. "Because it's impossible to work on, for various reasons. The most important being that I of course need a werewolf to experiment on. To test the tinctures I come up with. It isn't fun to be a lab rat, nor is it fun for me to make friends…and lovers…suffer only for my efforts to fail over and over again."

Lowell started to speak, but Peter cut him off. "And don't get any crazy notions. You have no idea what you're saying."

"It's time for dessert, I think." Sally stood, "I think you two will like it, being the coffee addicts that you are."

Peter visibly brightened. "Tiramasu?" He narrowed his eyes, "What did you do to it?"

"Not a single thing," Sally said with a smile that was all sweetness. "Just one moment and I'll bring it out. Help me with the dishes, muffin?"

Jordan immediately rose to help his wife.

The rest of the night was carefully void of any discussion of Peter's experiments, filled instead with anecdotes about what was going on between the mayor and the ghost on Mulberry Street.

Early sunlight was turning the sky a hazy gray when they finally left. Lowell yawned.

"Did you have fun?" Peter asked quietly.

Lowell smiled and then promptly yawned again. "Yes, I did. Though I'm sorry we upset you…"

"You didn't," Peter reassured him. "I'm only upset with myself." He grabbed Lowell's arm, stopping him at the roadside as a car full of teenagers and loud music zoomed past. He was slow to let go as they continued walking. "I don't like accepting defeat, even when I know that I never had a chance of succeeding."

"So…if you never thought it would work, why did you bother trying?"

Peter laughed, sad and faintly bitter. "There's a question with a complicated answer." He opened the door and led the way inside. "I was hoping that solving the perceived werewolf problem would fix a problem of my own."

"Oh." Lowell wasn’t sure what else to say.

"It doesn't really matter, anyway," Peter said tiredly. "It's all but impossible to resume the work."

"Because you don't have a werewolf to test things on?"

Peter nodded, "In part. But I also can't afford the single most important ingredient - the one thing that I know is crucial to the whole thing."

A beat of silence, as Lowell stared at him in confusion. Peter acted like he should know what he was talking about. The pieces of information he'd collected shifted in his head, then abruptly fell into place. Lowell let out a hiss of distress. "You mean silver."

"Yes. Silver. I need silver that's as pure as possible - the kind they use to make bullion and coins. It isn't cheap, and I don't make enough to afford the quantities I need to conduct an indeterminate number of experiments."

Lowell couldn’t help a shiver. Silver was awful. Worse than being cold and wet. Worse than being lost. Worse than having to go from place to place. Worse than almost anything. It hurt. A lot. Like…he didn't know what it was like. Silver was silver and it was Bad. Just being too close gave him a headache and some woman had once tripped and fallen into him and her necklace had touched him and it had burned for weeks.

And he'd have to drink the stuff? It made him ill just thinking about it.

Peter had moved away to get something to drink. Lowell watched him, trying not to think about how much it would suck to drink it.

But he wanted to, suddenly. Well, he wasn't looking forward to getting sick, which is what the silver would do to him. No, that he didn't want to do at all.

What he wanted was to see Peter stop looking so sad every time the subject came up. Lowell was the happiest he'd ever been, living with someone who thought he was normal and being invited to dinner and given wine. Like a real person.

"Would…would you do it again if I helped?"

Peter shook his head vigorously back and forth. "I told you not to get any crazy notions. It made the others sick and drove them away. And it's a moot point anyway - I don't have the silver."

"But I could buy it, couldn't I? Or give you the money, since I don't know how to buy silver."

"No."

"Why not!" Lowell protested, determined now that he'd decided what he wanted to do.

Peter set his glass of water down with deliberate care, stalking across the kitchen to stand over him. "Because you have no idea what you're talking about. It's stupid and fruitless and I won't keep hurting people trying to create something that will never exist!"

"You mean like Stacey?" Lowell regretted the words the minute he said, wishing he'd known he was going to say them so that he could tell himself to not say them. 'Stupid Werewolf Couldn't Keep Mouth Shut.'

"No, not like Stacey." Peter's eyes were dark, and he stepped back and away. "Stacey was…" he struggled with his words. "He was part of it, for a time. I had boarders from time to time, a few of them werewolves. They often agreed to help me with my experiments, eager for the cure. But when they realized it wasn't forthcoming any time soon, they left. The ones that lasted that long anyway. Most simply couldn’t handle the silver." He made a vague waving motion with his hand. "Who can blame them?"

He crossed the kitchen and lifted his glass of water, draining the contents in a single gulp and refilling it at the sink. "Stacey was different," he said quietly. "He lived with me…" he shook his head. "He was my lover for five years, as well as my assistant. But eventually he too got fed up with endless tests and zero results. I went into town one day to do some shopping…even bought him some new clothes because he'd torn his favorite ones transforming early one night…when I got back, not a trace of him remained. Except a note." His fingers tightened on the glass he held, and Lowell was afraid he'd break it.

"It wasn't just the experiments that made him hate me. But they were most of it. Now, near as I can tell, he goes around telling werewolves I found a cure. Just so I have to let them down when they come to ask me about it."

Lowell decided he really hated Stacey. The stupid werewolf was a moron and a jerk. Giving all of them a bad name. Like they didn't have enough problems already. "But if I could help - and promised not to get mad and wuss out and leave - and you had silver…would you do it again?"

A long silence. "It's tempting," Peter said at last, his voice barely audible. He seemed to shake himself. "But it's impossible. You can't promise something like that, because you don't know. I won't knowingly inflict that sort of torment upon you."

Acting before he thought - something he was doing more often of late and wasn't sure he entirely liked - Lowell crossed the kitchen and stood staring straight up at Peter. "In three days I'll turn into a wolf. Does that scare you?"

"Of course not," Peter said, confused.

"The transformation won't horrify you? A werewolf in your house and yard doesn't terrify you?"

"No."

Lowell's hands held tightly to the front of Peter's shirt; he wasn't even aware of it, attention focused entirely on the doctor. "You don't think I'll bite you?"

"No," and this time Peter seemed briefly amused.

It faded as Lowell continued to press him, "And when I change back you'll still look at me like I'm normal? And like me? And not kick me out?"

"Of course I'll still like you. I would never kick you out. And what about you isn't normal?"

Lowell blinked back tears, eyes burning. "You're the only one I can remember to treat me like I'm not a monster, knowing what I really am. You just said I'm normal even though really I'm just a pathetic, freeloading werewolf. Do you know how much that means to me? It's even better than finding a cure, even if one day you want me to leave."

Soft fingers stroked his cheek, "That becomes a bit more impossible every day, Low."

He'd never been called that before. And his cheek was doing that tingly warm thing again. "I know you want the cure - let me help. I want to help."

"I wish my brother was more like you," Peter said, fingers straying from his cheek to his hair. "He's the reason I want to find a cure." Gently he pried Lowell's fingers from his shirt. "We'll discuss this more after the full moon, all right?"

Lowell nodded and wearily closed his eyes, suddenly tired now that the conversation seemed to be ending.

A soft laugh, "You should get some rest. Vampire hours are not natural for the rest of us. Come on." Peter grasped Lowell's hand in his and guided the werewolf up the stairs, leaving him at the door to his bedroom.

"Good night," Lowell said with a yawn.

Peter 'tsked' softly and laughed again. "Good morning. You're as bad as the bloodsuckers." Reacting automatically, he dipped his head and kissed Lowell softly on the cheek - realizing what he'd done only as he stood up straight again. He froze in shock, then abruptly stalked toward his own bedroom, muttering quietly to himself before the closing of his door cut off all sounds.

"Bedtime," Lowell reminded himself, but it was another minute or two before he managed to stop staring at Peter's bedroom door, fingers pressed to his cheek.

Comments

[mercury-quirks.livejournal.com]

That was so cute ^_^ And funny and touching. Great mix. Not only am I a big fan of werewolves, but this story's just good. Love the vampires too. Especially the garlic thing.