"Do you know why you're here this afternoon, Mister Kellerman?" The man sitting across the table from Neil had a bland, professional expression under his curly blond beard, and his tone sounded ostentatiously friendly and polite. He looked like he was taking care of a rote formality, just ticking off the little box that said he'd interviewed Neil before getting on to his real work for the day. But Neil knew better. He understood from the moment he saw the ID badge exactly why FBI Agent Magnus Lokeson wanted to talk to him, even before they went into the cramped little room with the tape recorder and the video cameras. And even if the tall, Nordic bear of a man looked hotter than hell in his immaculately tailored suit, Neil wasn't going to give him anything.

So he replied, "I'm afraid I don't, sir," and waited in calm silence while his mind drifted deeper into the memory of his Master's wine-dark hypnotic gaze. It had been nine months since he'd looked into the eyes of vampire Antony Voronin for the first time, discovering a secret and supernatural truth that few in this world knew, and Neil could still see those slitted pupils as clearly as he did during the moment when they first shredded his weak and pathetic will and left him a thrall to the inhuman power of the undead majesty he served. Compared to that godlike potency, the authority of governments seemed trivial and insignificant; if Agent Lokeson expected him to sweat under the silent treatment, they were both going to be here a long while.

Sure enough, the man on the other side of the table lost his patience long before Neil lost his nerve. He took a long drink from his water bottle--Neil couldn't help noticing that he hadn't been offered anything--and reached into his briefcase, pulling out a photo and sliding it across the polished wood. "Does this help?" he asked, still sounding just as bored and disinterested as before. Neil didn't really believe it was anything more than just an act; as much as Agent Lokeson tried to pretend that this was strictly tedium, there was a subtle tension to the set of his broad, muscular shoulders that told the vampire's thrall that this was more than just routine.

Not that it surprised Neil. Apart from his compelled obedience to a nearly six hundred year old vampire, he lived a normal life--and yes, even through the fog of his Master's control, Neil understood the irony of that sentence--and for the FBI to bring him downtown to a field office they'd set up less than two blocks from the headquarters of Antony Voronin's shipping company told him that this was intimately related to his Master's affairs. And since Voronin was also the head of the New York Mafia, Agent Lokeson was probably very excited for this little conversation whatever he might pretend.

Not that Neil was going to let any of that slip. His loyalties were pure and perfect and absolute. They couldn't be anything else, not when he was a human with a human's weak and feeble will and his Master was a powerful, ancient creature of the night. "I recognize the picture, if that's what you mean," he said mildly, staring down at the photo with a flat, neutral gaze. "It's the front of my apartment building." He didn't bother telling them that the man walking into the front lobby was Antony Voronin. They already knew, and he had no intention of giving them any information they couldn't prove. It was how Neil kept his Master's secrets... and the memory of those burning eyes made that more important than anything.

Agent Lokeson's mouth twitched at the corner in a tiny, rueful smile. "The man in that picture has been to your apartment over a hundred times in the last nine months," he said, his voice aching with weary patience. "I have some very interesting pictures from those encounters, I won't trouble you with those. But I want to make it clear from the outset that there's really no way you're going to convince me that Antony Voronin is some kind of casual acquaintance, or a stranger who just happens to be in your neighborhood a lot. So with that said, Mister Kellerman... why do you think I brought you here this afternoon?"

Neil's smile hardened. "Well, I'd imagine that... on top of being a voyeur and a Peeping Tom... you're one of those deeply unpleasant people who believes the rumors about Mister Voronin's connections to organized crime. If you've come here to ask me questions about him, I assure you--we don't talk much during our social engagements. It's a more, um, physical companionship." Neil's body remained perfectly still, even as his mind drifted back to night after night of shuddering arousal as the Master took him and his boyfriend Forrest again and again until their cocks couldn't even so much as twitch anymore. "As I'm sure you and your photographers have noticed." He slid his chair back, putting his hands on the table to signal his intention to rise. "Now if that's all, I'd really like to get home sometime before midnight. Or to speak with a lawyer. Either will do."

He wasn't expecting Agent Lokeson's response. "Oh, please, Mister Kellerman," the tall man chuckled, his outburst more amusement than the anger Neil anticipated. "We both know you don't know a damn thing about Voronin's operations. You've never been to his social club, you've never met any of his lieutenants, you've never made any deliveries for him... if I wanted to talk to someone about his connections to the Mafia, I'd speak to your boyfriend and we both know it." That stung just a little. Not enough to get under his skin, not enough to break through the inhuman grip that the Master had on Neil's feeble human will, but it stung.

Neil was only a thrall to the vampire's gaze, after all. Owned and captured by the psychic force emanating from Voronin's inhuman eyes, completely captured and compelled to obey, but still ultimately no different from anyone whose mind survived contact with the power vampires used to stun their prey into compliance. But Forrest, Neil's lover... he'd taken the Master's blood in unholy communion. They shared the same eyes, knew each other's thoughts. It was an intimacy given to few, and ultimately an intimacy that Neil--as much as he loved his controller--wasn't useful enough to deserve.

Neil tried to choke back that anger, but he could hear the bite in his voice as he snapped back, "So why am I here, then? Do you want me to become an informant? Plant a bug in his shoe while he's fucking my boyfriend's ass, that kind of thing?" He didn't rise to his feet. Not yet. Not when he knew it would give away the emotions he was fighting so hard to control with every ounce of the power his Master held over him. Agent Lokeson wasn't going to get that satisfaction. Not when he was still trying to get inside Neil's head and trick him into giving up some vital piece of information that would doom his owner, even if Neil had no idea what that might be.

Again, though, the federal agent's reaction was unexpected... to say the least. "That's a really good idea!" Lokeson said, looking genuinely surprised. "Probably work, too. No, I didn't bring you here for any of that. I brought you here because quite frankly, this is the single most boring thing I've ever done in my life and I want to make it more exciting. Can you help me with that, Mister Kellerman? Can you help in taking this extremely tedious federal investigation and making it fun?" He smiled, his ruddy cheeks crinkling under his blond curly beard into a grin so warm and enthusiastic that it was almost disturbing. Neil half-expected Ashton Kutcher to burst into the room with a camera crew and let him in on the joke.

That didn't happen. Nobody came in. The silence stretched out, and this time Neil felt it in a way he hadn't before. "Make it... fun?" he asked at last, unable to resist his curiosity. "Your primary concern about your federal investigation into an accused mob boss with alleged criminal ties to every single organized illegal activity in the island of Manhattan is that it's not... fun?" Neil suddenly wished he'd taken a closer look at that FBI badge. Perhaps it wasn't as authentic as he thought. Were federal agents even allowed to grow ponytails? Did they still have to get a buzzcut like they did back in the Fifties?

The agent's response did nothing to calm Neil's growing concerns. "Oh, GOD no!" Lokeson cried out, leaping to his feet and beginning to pace the small interview room. "And you have no idea how cosmically unfair that is. So many status reports, and progress reports, and conversations with forensic accountants, and economy flights to Washington DC to meet with boring old men who all have the same damn haircut... I mean, really, Mister Kellerman! Don't you at least see a little bit of the injustice of it all? I am watching not just a mob boss, but a vampire mob boss, and the closest I've come to seeing him do a single interesting thing is watching him fuck you and your boyfriend every few nights!"

Neil almost missed the end of the sentence. He barely even heard it, barely heard anything after the word 'vampire'. "I... I'm sorry, w-what?" he asked, his voice thick with stunned amazement. He could feel the color draining from his face, leaving him almost as ashen as his Master. "Wuh, wuh, what did you just say?" He looked over at the tape recorder sitting on the table, looked up at the video camera in the corner of the ceiling. "Did you just say, on record, that you think Antony is a, a, a....?" It was no good. He couldn't say it. Even when he was merely confirming someone else's use of the word, the compulsion to keep his undead Master's secrets was too strong.

"On the...." Agent Lokeson's brow furrowed in confusion, and he followed Neil's bewildered stare down to the tape recorder on the table. "Oh! Oh, no, those aren't turned on. I don't want any of this showing up in the official investigation records, Mister Kellerman. That's why I brought you to this empty office instead of our field headquarters. This is a very private conversation, Mister Kellerman. That's why I invited you instead of Mister Luther. Anything Forrest knows, Afanasiy knows, right?" He smiled even wider. It was beginning to look a little like a rictus.

"I, you... w-what do you know? How do you know?" Neil felt his hypnotic compulsion slipping just a little, the curtain falling away now that he knew that Lokeson was no ordinary FBI agent. He had a duty, a responsibility to his Master to find out what Magnus knew and how he knew it, and if that meant accepting an exchange of information then Neil found that his devotion to Voronin's safety allowed it. The agent already knew Voronin was a vampire, after all. He knew his secret name and he knew that Forrest was blood-bonded to the undead. Telling him more couldn't hurt.

"I know that Afanasiy has gotten fucking boring, that's what I know," Lokeson said wryly. "I thought that maybe if I gave him a little bit of pressure, something to shake up his comfortable lifestyle and snap him out of his commitment to bloodless mediocrity, it might force him to do something interesting again like he did in the old days. But honestly, if I have to spend another three years building a... a fucking criminal case against him? I am not going to make it. I am honestly not going to make it another fucking week doing this tedious bullshit. Do you know that I was buried under a crossroads for three years once, and even that was more interesting than taking a meeting with the Deputy Director of the Organized Crime division of the FBI? No. No, we are done with subtle. I was never very good at subtle anyway."

Neil stared at the man, suddenly and acutely aware that this was a very small room with only one exit and Agent Lokeson blocked it. "Who are you?" he whispered, his intuition giving him something of a clue already. "W-what are you?" He kept his gaze level on the other man's chest. He didn't want to admit what his subconscious was already telling him, but he knew it would be a very bad idea to look Magnus Lokeson in the eyes right now.

"Oh, come on," the agent chuckled, darting forward with inhuman speed and gripping Neil by the back of the neck. Despite himself, the memory of all those nights held helpless in Antony's grasp made Neil's cock stiffen in his trousers. "Didn't the name give it away? Lokeson. Son of Loki. That's me, a trickster born and blooded. I found immortality a thousand years ago, in the cold valleys of Norway where the nights never ended. The one who took me said he was a god, and I took him at his word. He sent me out into the world to create chaos, Mister Kellerman. And that's what I'm about to do." He nipped at his own wrist with teeth that were suddenly as sharp as needles, slicing open a vein and letting the unnaturally dark blood flow freely.

"Whatever you do," he said, his words ever so slightly muffled by the unnatural shape of his fangs against his tongue. "Don't. Stop. Drinking. Your life depends on it." And he put his wrist to Neil's lips and his mouth to Neil's throat.

There was pain, then, but only a little. Neil still had the Master's eyes inside his mind, even after all these months, and they numbed the loss of blood to a pleasant coolness that began in his extremities and slowly worked its way up to his head. A part of him welcomed his own diminishment, convinced by the vampire's hypnotic power that surrendering his vitality to the immortal undead was the perfect conclusion to a life well-lived. He could feel the arousal between his legs, his cock throbbing and pulsing even as his veins emptied out, giving him a potent sexual pleasure that almost made dying worthwhile... but there was that taste. That dark, iron-rich taste filling his mouth. Neil couldn't help swallowing it down in great, suckling guzzles to replenish what he was rapidly losing.

Every gulp brought a little of Lokeson's power into him, replacing the human essence that flowed out through his carotid artery into the vampire's mouth. Every pumping beat of his heart expended a little more of his vitality into the trickster, to be transformed by some arcane and alchemical process into the necrocity of the undead. They joined in a kind of communion, cycling one another's blood through their bodies in a dark and twisted commingling that only ended when there was nothing left of the living in Neil. And yet, at the same time, he was far, far from empty. If anything, as his cock demonstrated, he was practically engorged.

"You're going to be hungry soon," Lokeson said, finally removing his bloody mouth from the newborn vampire's throat and letting him loose to collapse to the floor. "I know a very nice bar full of people who won't be missed. Would you like to see how the other half lives... Neil?"

Neil looked up at him. The thralldom was gradually fading from his mind now, replaced by a strange stirring of power that felt almost intoxicating. And an aching thirst that absolutely could not be denied. "I... yes," he muttered, his thoughts already turning to his lover and the man who might have given this gift to them months ago but never even bothered. "Yes," he said quietly, his erection achingly hard at the notion of taking another man and penetrating him in a whole new way. "Yes, I would." And Magnus Lokeson smiled at the notion of a little more chaos entering the world.

THE END