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The Shadow Partners

Chapter 9

Notes:

(See the end of the chapter for notes.)

Chapter Text

Chapter 9 – She’s About 90% of His Impulse Control

 

Down in the Cell…

 

He had to get out.

Dracula snapped back to consciousness, those words burned into his mind and he lunged upright in one move.

He stared wildly about himself, knowing the cell was empty of all other inhabitants before he even finished looking.

The place was trashed. Furniture shattered, the padded walls shredded and blood pooled black and sticky everywhere.

Dracula wrinkled his nose when it offered no temptation for him and lunged to his feet. His hands opened and closed into clawed fists by his sides again and again. His chest heaved with every breath and a low growl rumbled from him in a near constant roll of thunder. His eyes were flooded red, his pupils a shimmering silver and his fangs bared.

They had her.

They had Agatha.

Instinct roared through him, tearing at his insides with red hot claws and the burning desire to be free. He had been repressing it since he had willingly walked into this prison but now that Agatha was gone. Now that they had her and were doing who knew what to her…well. His patience was done and he was prepared to commit all manner of atrocities to get his own way.

Dracula strode to the centre of the room, to where the sweeping trails of blood led and ended, and looked up. He could barely see it, where the tube of elevator they used to get them in and out of the cell met seamlessly with the ceiling.

A droplet of blood smeared was his only clue.

With a snarl, Dracula leapt up, his claws punching into the padded tiles of the ceiling and biting deep to find purchase. He scrabbled until his talons found something to hook around and then curled upward, his feet braced against the ceiling as he hung upside down and examined the one way out of the cell that he knew of.

He savaged the padding. Tore it away in great hanks and plumes of insulated stuffing. He snarled low and vicious, uncaring of the torture it put his claws through and ripped at the ceiling until the hub of the lowest edge of the tube was revealed. He clawed at it, sparks flying from his fingertips as his steely talons glanced off the metallic edge. He dug into the softer edges around the metal until he met more metal and his claws could go no further. He bit at it, he howled in rage and he tore, but it was no use.

With a roar, Dracula twisted away, dropping to the floor and howling in rage. He surged forward, lashing out at the couch and snapping it cleanly in half with a single blow. The spine of the wooden frame snapping like kindling under his strength.

Half mad and barely lucid, he stared about himself. He forced himself to breathe. To think. He had gotten them into this. He had walked into this prison thinking he had known that he could get out any time and he refused for his confidence to become hubris. To lose it would mean that he had lost Agatha and he would not.

Agatha.

Just the thought of her calmed him a little even as part of him was borderline rabid to have her back. He needed to keep it together. For her. If he did not, if he could not get to her, then the Harkers would have her to experiment on and he would not have it. He wouldn’t.

What would she do? She was very clever, that wife of his, she would know how to get out.

He ignored the snarky voice that told him she’d have surely done so already if she could have but things had been transpiring and he was confident that she hadn’t only because she had been distracted by him.

He was very distracting, after all.

What did Agatha do? When she was backed into a corner. She…

Dracula stilled, the red receding from his eyes as storm clouds do over the horizon. His gaze darted to the fourth wall of their cell. The lightless black window that peered out into the darkened abyss of water beyond.

Agatha, when she was in trouble, made allies. She gathered people to her and she turned them into an army.

It was a talent Dracula had either never had or forgotten he had possessed. He had certainly commanded armies before but they had worked for him, that had been different. He had been a warlord of no small power and the weak flocked to power in order to borrow from its shadow. To be protected.

Agatha’s followers were not like that. They pooled their strength with hers and they were altogether quite terrifying because of it.

The nuns, even if he had quickly dispatched them once dear Johnny had let him in, had never once faltered in their faith. Not before or after seeing him in all of his monstrous glory. They had died because of the wolves, not because he had broken them. Even when he had taken their mother superior’s head, even when he had literally decapitated their leadership, they had stood against him.

He could not claim that seasoned soldiers would have done the same under his or any other banner. That had not been how wars were fought in his time.

So he didn’t have an army. Mere details.

What he did have…was charm.

There was another very clear way out of the cell, after all. One that had been staring them in the face since day one.

They had just chosen not to use it because…because the situation had not yet called for it.

Hesitation was a foreign concept to Dracula so he wasted no time.

He strode across the cell, leaving bloodied footprints on the padded floor, hauled back and swung with all of his might.

His fist slammed into the glass with a reverberating thud that rattled him all the way to his teeth. Dracula snarled, unfazed by the way the glass shuddered but did not give. He was determined.

THOOM!

He rammed his fist into the glass once more. His bones creaked and he thought his muscles might have popped somewhere but he was rewarded with the tiniest splinter in the glass.

So he hit it again. And again.

The same spot, over and over. A crack appeared, fine as a spiderweb, but he was not to be undone. Progress was progress. He battered both fists into the glass, laying siege upon it until –finally- something in it gave.

A tiny splinter, a bare sliver, of glass flew from the wound he had won of it and smacked him sharply in the chest. A jet of water, salty and sweet with beckoning freedom, gushed after it. He was splattered and soaked within seconds but he smashed at the glass again.

He tore at the glass, slicing into his fingers and chipping his claws but he didn’t care. He pulled a fist sized chunk from the reinforced glass and was staggered back by a jet of saltwater as thick as his own forearm punching him in the chest. He splashed backwards, water pouring into the cell and grinned, panting hard.

In the dim of the water, far beyond the broken window, he saw the thrum of a bloodied red light.

Ariel.

Dracula grinned.

“Heeeere, fishy, fishy, fishy…”

This was going to be fun.

 

Upstairs…

 

Agatha twisted when she saw Bloxam’s finger tighten on the trigger of the gun. She jinked madly to the side and felt the bullet burn her ear as it whizzed past her to smash into the faceplate of the guard behind her.

His metal limbs slackened, in surprise or shock at being shot in the face and Agatha was free in an instant. She swarmed across the floor, smacking the gun away, yanking Bloxam’s hand from her neck and sank her teeth into the ruin of the human’s throat without an instant of hesitation.

She drank deep, draining Bloxam in great sucking pulls and dropped the woman to the floor when she felt the life leave her.

Agatha lifted her head with a low snarl and turned to observe the guard behind her.

Dead. He had removed his faceplate in order to breathe since she had pulled off his oxygen tank and being shot in the face was deadly to most humans. He wore a neat hole in the middle of his forehead and a grey and pink slop was leaking out of his helmet and onto the floor.

The sirens still wailed overhead and there was something of a worrying tremor to the floor beneath her. If she listened hard, she could hear the shouts of panic beyond the lab. Something was certainly going on and she had little doubt as to who was behind the utter pandemonium. Dracula had always had a flare for the dramatic and bloodshed. It would surprise her not at all to find him behind this somehow.

Not that she had needed the distraction, Agatha reminded herself as she padded to the door of the cell and examined it, she had been doing just fine on her own. She’d have gotten her claws on Bloxam one way or the other, even without the help of Dracula…doing whatever he had done to reduce the structural integrity of an oil rig.

Now that she thought on it, that was a trifle concerning. They were in the middle of the ocean and their prison was falling apart around their ears. Which was all well and good and had been on the cards anyway but Agatha’s hazy plan had very much involved not being inside same prison at the time of mass destruction.

“I swear, this is like the Demeter all over again.” Agatha grumbled to herself and hissed out a breath of annoyance when she found the lock to be biometric.

An obstacle but not insurmountable.

“Doctor Bloxam, I’m afraid I need a hand.” Agatha turned back to the woman’s corpse. “Or perhaps a head, one never knows when two minds shall be better than one.”

Agatha padded across the room to gather up the pieces of Bloxam she required.

Whatever Dracula was doing, he was certainly causing enough of a distraction to allow her to escape unhindered. No one had come pounding through the door to attempt to restrain or sedate her once more. No one seemed interested in her at all.  

Typical male.

Still, she did her best work when he was wrapped up in his own ego.

 

Meanwhile, Back With Dracula…

 

Dracula squinted against the blistering speed of the saltwater against his eyes. His hands, arms and back screamed with the effort of holding onto the somewhat bizarrely named Ariel as she powered up through the water.

Deep thrumming wails came from somewhere within the cavern of her great chest. Dracula wrapped one arm more securely around the dorsal fin spearing upwards from where the waist might be on a human.

Ariel’s great voice rang out through the ocean around them and he could feel the echo of it rattling in his skull and jangling that part of his head that let him wander out amongst the space between waking and dreams.

She was calling someone. Something. He knew not what and he quite frankly did not care. So long as she kept up her end of the deal.

Dracula’s lungs were beginning to burn and he resented once more that he’d been brought back to something like life for this. Things had been much easier when he hadn’t had to breathe at all. Then again, Agatha hadn’t been nearly so attracted to him before the whole pulse and respiration thing so he’d take what he could get.

He was dimly aware of a haunting answering call from somewhere out in the dark but then Ariel twisted in the water and he realised they were at their destination.

The lowest part of the oil rig.

Ariel thrummed a deep sound, swirling around the rig like blood in the water and she crooned a question to him.

He was sure?

Well, he thought that was what she was asking. Communication between them was still something of a primitive affair and was based roughly on the targets of their bloodlust happening to be the same.

Ariel had the brute strength to make it happen and Dracula had the knowledge of how humans built things in order to get her inside.

Dracula struggled hand over hand up over Ariel’s back as she twisted in the water. He deftly avoided some sort of biting eel that lived in the depths of her mane of hair and clutched at her shoulder. She didn’t appear to mind or even notice the bite of his claws as he struggled for grip on her slick skin but she did turn her oddly flat face to look at him with gigantic black eyes.

He pointed up, his night vision picking out a pinprick of light in the encompassing dark. Chances were, what he was looking for would be lit up for the ease of humans finding it.

Ariel nodded, a gesture she had learned from Agatha or himself and surged upwards. They avoided the tube that connected the cell far below to the rig, Dracula knew that would be expected and they headed instead for another point of ingress. Hence, looking for a little patch of bright in the dark.

Ariel undulated through the water, rising swiftly until she hung less than a meter from their goal. She cocked her huge head, studying the slim access hatch left over from the days when the rig had been used for its original purpose. Dracula stretched up over her, wrapping his hand in her mane to keep anchored.

The red light that bled from Ariel was just illumination enough to see and Dracula squinted to read the writing in the hazy light.

PULL TO OPEN

Well, didn’t mind if he did.

Dracula fisted a hand around the hatch lever, which must have been originally installed for maintenance or access, and yanked. His muscles bunched, preparing to battle against the pressure of the ocean but the panel slid apart with surprising ease, leaving a circle of light beyond and the ripple of water meeting air.

Ariel hissed in displeasure, dropping a few feet in the water to avoid the light. A habit Dracula could identify with but he had more pressing concerns.

Plucking a crab from his forearm, he shoved it back into the mass of Ariel’s hair and kicked off her shoulder and up into the access hatch.

His head broke the surface and someone promptly shot him.

Dracula lunged out of the water without further hesitation, blood trailing behind him from the wound on his ear. He did believe he was now missing a good portion of it. With a roar, he was across the room and on his attacker in an instant.

Some sort of security personnel. They were dressed in simple black fatigues and carried automatic weaponry. Dracula jinked left, right, up onto the ceiling and then pounced onto the man in the time it took for the poor fellow to blink. The human folded up beneath him like a broken accordion and Dracula tossed him unerringly towards the hatch behind him without missing a beat. He lunged for the second soldier, ignoring the bullets ripping into his chest and fastened his fangs around the man’s throat instead.

Using this body as a shield, Dracula moved from one soldier to the next. Rending them limb from limb and working his way deeper into the room.

He was breathing hard by the time he was done, his chest stung horribly and his ear was ringing where it had been shot but he was alive –still- and pissed.

Turning back to look at the hatch he had come through, Dracula saw Ariel’s huge hand patting the floor around the hatch. He tossed another body her way and watched as it was dragged into the water which frothed pink.

Poor thing, they really hadn’t been feeding her well at all.

Now, to see about letting her in.

This part of his plan had relied on the excessive preparedness of his captors but considering how well his cell had been thought out, Dracula didn’t think that would be a problem.

He turned to the fallen soldiers, rifling through their pockets and pouches. He found several egg shaped objects that some hazy blood memory told him was a…a…grenade. Went boom if borrowed memory served and, ooh, something with the blocky helpful words of FACE TOWARD ENEMY written upon the grey face of it.

“Nice. Very nice.” Dracula gathered up his spoils and pushed the rest of the soldiers out through the hatch. The sinking bodies would occupy Ariel long enough for him to see about making a doorway big enough to fit her bulk.

He knew that she could survive in an oxygenated environment. He had seen that when she had pushed into his half flooded cell and had attempted to eat him. It had been a hairy few moments to forge a connection with her and make sure that they both wanted the same thing and had better chances of getting it if they worked together.

He still wasn’t entirely certain that she wasn’t going to eat him when she was done but needs must and all that.

Dracula packed the explosives around the lip of the hatch, the water frothing and crimson beneath.  He searched a moment for how to detonate his little pile of destruction and then pulled the pins from the grenades in quick succession.

Honestly, why give him the blood of trained soldiers?

Just silly really.

Dracula darted across the room, finding a bulkhead to hide behind, clapped his hands over his ears and opened his mouth as some helpful soldier’s memories told him to do.

The explosion was incredible.

Dracula, even behind the bulkhead, was thrown into the wall by the red hot gust of force that came from the explosives. The floor of the access room was torn apart into warped slag and shrapnel and it was lightning reflexes and luck that saved him from being harpooned. The entire rig appeared to heave with the explosion and his ears were blown out alongside the floor.

Dracula staggered upright after a long and ringing moment. He could hear nothing, his balance was shot and there was a very insistent ringing echoing around his skull. He blinked rapidly, centring himself and was brought back to the more pressing concerns of the moment when water sloshed around his ankles.

The frigid shock of it snapped him back into reality. He followed the trail of the water and saw Ariel greedily hauling herself through the hole he’d made in the floor for her.

The hole that was letting the room rapidly fill with water.

Ah. He hadn’t thought of that.

A faint notion about air pressure and how it was important to maintaining the whole water on the outside of the rig niggled in his head but he didn’t have the whole memory and so dismissed it as unimportant.

He wasn’t planning on staying anyway.

“This way, old girl!” Dracula spun drunkenly on unsteady legs, his hearing coming back to him in pops and starts as his eardrums attempted to reconstitute and made for the door.

So the oil rig was flooding and that hadn’t been part of the plan. Agatha would be cross but he was rather hoping the fact that he had made a friend with her pet fish might make up for that.

Dracula accidentally pulled the door off the hinges when he staggered to it and yanked it open but destruction of private property really was the least of his worries.

He lunged through it, hearing shouts as if through a bubble and darted forward when a soldier rounded the dim corridor. He slammed the smaller man into the wall, this one without the automaton armour as well, tore the gun from his hands and then pitched him wildly over his shoulder.

The man’s screams dissolved into bubbling gurgles as Ariel seized him in her talons, shoved his entire torso into her mouth and snipped him in half with a tousle of her head. Blood and viscera splashed everywhere. Dracula winced in sympathy but rather the soldier than him.

That had been the deal, after all. Because Ariel was so very hungry.

Dracula hurried forward again, very aware of Ariel finishing her latest morsel and slithering after him along the corridor. It was a tight fit for her, she crammed herself into it and he suspected it was only the gelatinous slick that covered her whole body that allowed her to squeeze along the corridor in his wake. She dragged herself along the floor incredibly quickly for a creature of such bulk. Hand over hand, her talons gripping the bulkhead lips in the corridor and heaving her along as her tail thrashed like a snake to propel her.

Dracula, for his part, kept going up.

He could faintly smell Agatha, over the piscine rot of Ariel and the blood that she washed the decks with. She was somewhere above them and he’d rather get to her before Ariel forgot their deal in her feeding frenzy.

He met more and more soldiers on his way, bullets thundering into his chest and arms, piercing his stomach but he had little time for that. He snapped those in half that he could and hurled those he couldn’t behind him into Ariel’s waiting maw. She snaffled them up like a terrier would rats and grasped hungrily for more. Going so far as to reach beyond Dracula and snatch the soldiers up before they even reached him.

Dracula ducked into the first side corridor he came across and let Ariel overtake him. She seemed entirely unaware of his absence and gleefully barrelled along the corridor, destabilising walls and structural integrity in her wake. She snatched up soldiers and gulped them down happily. She seemed to have entirely forgotten about her urge to find her family or whoever it was the Harkers held in this place to keep her docile, but Dracula had not.

He waded out into the corridor when it was safe to do so, the water above his knees and strength sapping in its frigid chill. He surged forward, digging deep for the memories of the soldiers whose blood he’d had and how to get up.

There were twists and turns, it was a circuitous route to the decks above but he didn’t care and he didn’t stop. When he could, he snatched up the people he found along the way and bled them dry. They tasted less than beneficial under the circumstances and it occurred to him that he perhaps did not know how to feed his new biology but that was a problem for later.

Dracula was hurled sideways into the railing of the ladder he climbed when another explosion rocked the entire rig. He caught his already fragile ribs and a bullet plinked out of his side and clattered to the floor, bouncing down into the water beneath him.

“Bloody hell, only madmen explode things in oil rigs.” Dracula growled, briefly hoping that Ariel was still causing enough of a distraction to keep the bulk of the soldiers from coming his way and hurled himself out into a corridor that seemed a little more…refined.

Dracula leaned heavily into the wall, breathing hard and riddled with pain.

If this was being alive again, he’d rather not.

“Labs?” Dracula read the stencilled black writing over his head and frowned. He scrubbed saltwater from his eyes and shook himself, forcing himself to think. “Labs! Yes. Want those.”

Dracula shoved himself along the corridor, bracing himself against either wall and not even pausing to yank another bullet out of his flesh on his way. He tossed it aside with a grumbling growl and slithered to a halt only when a door to his left suddenly hissed apart.

His lips lifted from his teeth, fully prepared to tear into whoever was on the other side and he stalled, all the air leaving him when he found who he was looking for. A grin spread over his mouth.

“Agatha.” He breathed her name in a far softer tone than he would ever readily admit to and wavered uncertainly when she only stared at him with wide blank eyes. Something tumultuous in her gaze that he couldn’t name. “Agatha? Did they hurt you?”

She was dressed in a paper like gown, tied at the back of her neck and that appeared to be it. Blood splattered her face and neck, soaking into the front of the gown. Her hair was a mad tangle, her eyes gleaming gold and she held the severed head of what looked very much to be Doctor Bloxam in one hand. Her eyes roved over him, hitching on the bloodied mess of his torso, the odd angle of one of his wrists that he hadn’t gotten around to setting straight yet.

“Agatha. Speak to me.” He stepped cautiously towards her, unsure of how he would be received and was altogether unprepared for her to move toward him.

“Mine.” She growled, dropping the head in one hand and tunnelling her fingers into his hair.

Dracula was barrelled across the corridor, Agatha wrapped around him like a creeping vine and her mouth pressed hot and needy to his.

Dracula growled after a stunned second, forgetting the near drowning, the mermaid in the bowels of the oil rig, forgetting the flooding and the mad scientists and being torn apart and brought back to life. He forgot all of that because Agatha had him in her arms and she kissed him like an angel before its Fall.

Dracula cradled her head in his hands, his claws raking softly in her hair. Her mouth moved against his with far more fervour than finesse but he found that oddly charming. Her tongue slid into his mouth as if she owned him and he supposed she did rather. He clung to her, letting her kiss him, cling to him, cleave to him.

Realising that a warzone was a stupid place to get distracted only when the metal speared through her chest.

Notes:

Did I promise you bloodshed? Did I promise you gore, body horror and injury?

YES I DID INDEEDY.

I also promised the Soft and Kisses and Cuddles.

Get yoself a fic writer that can do both ;)