"I think they're gone." The man relaxed and after a hesitant second, he held out his hand to Ren. 

Ren looked at it flatly. His eyes flickered up to the man’s.

"You punched me," he said, as if that was all he needed to say to clarify. 

"You bit me," the man replied, but he lowered his hand anyway.

Though it was true, Ren had only been defending himself. He narrowed his eyes, unsure where this conversation was going. He should have high tailed it out of there since there was no impending threat and this vampire didn't seem like he was going to rip his throat out.

"And hit me with a branch.”

Ren rolled his eyes.

"I'm sorry then." He wasn't. Not in the least.

The threat wasn't the man now. It was someone who was on the loose in the forest and could be after anyone next. Ren's heart settled and he struggled to get up from the ground. 

The man looked almost like he wanted to help Ren up and as nice as that seemed, it was also fucking irritating. 

Ren dusted himself off, wincing as his wrists ached with every swipe. His body was unforgiving in that. It just couldn't stop reminding him how much of a failure he was. 

The buzz hummed in agreement. Ren just cursed it as it was all he could do.

"What now?”

It sounded strange now that his fear had settled. Of course, there was the smell of blood that he couldn't get off his mind, but that was something he was just going to have to get over if he wanted to make it back home without anymore incident. 

This was also too much like a normal conversation. He was caught between wanting to run away and also budging into the man's personal space. He blamed it on the buzzing and the headache it was causing him. It wasn't like it was his fault that a girl had been murdered and this man just so happened to be here at the wrong time. 

They were talking as if all of this was normal. That didn't sit right with him for some reason.

Ren stopped himself, looking at the man with a kind of fixation that he couldn't place anywhere else. Then he remembered he hadn't even caught the man's name. They were already twisted in a murderous plot, had fought, and he'd had the man's blood in his mouth.

There was also the fact that his body—for some fucked up reason—was turned on by him.

They couldn't get any more personal than that. 

"Who are you?" Ren hadn't meant for his voice to break or for it to be a hushed whisper. They were out of danger, as far as he could tell, and there wasn't a reason for them to be so quiet.

But he couldn't find the guts to speak up. It didn't seem right in the large span of things. 

The question led to a string of information Ren might not want to hear and he feared the unwanted was what he was going to get.

The man turned, his red eyes too intense for Ren to look into. He glanced away only to stare at the lobe of the man's ear. The adrenaline had helped Ren beat and yell at the man was gone. It was replaced with the awkwardness that followed him everywhere else. 

It was uncomfortable to stand there with the man's gaze on him, knowing this was the first time he was actually looking at Ren. None of what the man was thinking mattered, but the doubt and lies Ren told himself were too real to ignore. He couldn't explain, he couldn't justify, anything he was feeling and that made it fucking worse. 

"Hold on." The man grabbed Ren by the shoulder. Ren looked at the offending hand, unsure if he should deal with the horrid touch or push the man's hand away. "Are you...you don't know who I am?”

Ren blinked. “No?"

Maybe he should have. The second he saw him Ren knew he was a vampire, but he hadn't thought beyond that. He hadn't even wondered who he was until this very moment. 

Staring at him now, he saw that the man wasn't really a man. He couldn't have been older than Ren himself, but the way he'd carried himself had made Ren think he was much older. His face was no longer hardened in thought nor was it overshadowed. The moonlight glinted off the delicate slopes of his face.

He was on the edge of being a man. Perhaps in numbers he was, but his face showed that he had much to learn before he was out of boyhood.

Those thoughts swarmed Ren's head. It took a little longer than it should have before it dawned on him. 

"Oh." He could barely hear the soft spoken word himself. It was a lost sound in the forest. 

The Mantels lived around this side of the mountain. He didn't know how far or close they lived, but he knew the general area. It wasn't hard to put two and two together when it was right front of his face. 

He was no longer 'the man'. He was Mantel in Ren's mind.

Mantel's touch was like a burning iron seeping into Ren's skin. Ren stepped away, his eyes questioning everything around him. 

"It's just me," Mantel said and he held Ren's shoulder firmly. "I promise.”

Ren didn't know why he believed him. It might be how true his expressions were or how he said it so softly. As if it was an admission that held more weight than he was letting on. But Ren was still cautious. He had to be. There was a dead body lying less than a mile away from them.

"You're a Mantel." Ren said it with such certainty he actually might have known him. 

His breathless voice carried in the wind and he wanted to be carried off with it. This night had turned too strange even for him to comprehend. He felt like his arms were being pulled to the ground. It felt as if he might collapse there, right now, with a Mantel right before him.

It was like seeing a ghost for the first time. The Mantels were legends, folklore kids in town joked about, but Ren had never thought about meeting one in real life. 

He nodded mostly for himself. The best thing, the smartest thing, to do then would be walk away. But he knew if Mantel wanted to he could do anything to him. Even though Mantel didn't look like he was going to kill Ren, he had a feeling Mantel didn't want him leaving.

He never confirmed he was a Mantel. He didn't need to. Ren knew he was right just by the look on his face. There was no doubt then, nothing that made Ren unsure of the truth.

His hands were shaking. The pain in his wrists and his face were muted as he felt a panic attack creeping on him. He breathed evenly to calm his racing heart. The buzzing loomed around him, laughing as he began to lose control. Again. He could feel it starting to lose control again.

Blood. Painted all around him. He wanted to bathe in it. 

He grabbed the sides of his head, groaning as a whirlwind of dark thoughts interrupted his own. This wasn't the lack of a feeding. This was because the buzzing wasn't getting what it wanted and now it was going to throw a fit. 

He got it to settle down. 

"What are we going to do?" He swallowed down the unbearable urge to cry. His emotions were acting on their own. It wasn't like him to cry. His body didn't know what to do and he didn't know either. 

The girl's face, her mouth slack as if she'd been about to scream one last time, flashed in his head. She didn't look much older than him either. 

Mantel thought over Ren's question. He had a hard look in his eyes and he looked down with his brows drawn together. Ren couldn't be of any help. He didn't want to help.

The shaking in his hands was all because he didn't know what to do with himself now that the adrenaline had passed. The buzzing had given him control of his body for once, but it was now he wished that it had taken all the responsibility. 

"Let's look at the body," Mantel finally said. He let go of Ren's shoulder and began walking toward the site where the girl's body would be waiting. "Maybe...maybe it wasn't a vampire. It could have been an animal.”

Ren followed closely behind, but he wanted to run. The fear he'd bottled inside kept him glued to Mantel's side and his stupid curiosity wanted to stay to find out the truth. He wasn't quite sure if it was his own curiosity or the sick and twisted ways of the buzzing. 

"You think an animal did this?”

Animals that lived in the forest were deer, rabbits, and squirrels. He'd never seen a predator besides owls and had never heard of anyone being attacked by a wolf or coyote.

He wrapped his arms around himself, his eyes focused on the path ahead of him. He was starting to breathe evenly again, his heart not pounding as hard as before, but he felt just as weightless. It was a battle between his body floating or being pulled down by his own weight. 

He couldn't cypher the meaning or start to understand if it meant anything at all. This feeling. All the feelings that were swirling around him as he tried to regain control. Time had run from him. He hadn't been thinking about home or what he was going to do when he returned to the real world. 

Because this was going to end. At some point. And then he would have to deal with everything else once more.

Mantel, whatever his first name was, was starting to look less like the killer the more time Ren spent with him. And for only knowing him for ten minutes, Ren started to feel like he could trust him. The feeling confused him for one. 

He hated strangers. He hated everyone and everything that wasn't his mom. 

New people were hard to figure out and seeing as he spent most of his life running away from danger, it made sense that he didn't trust others easily.

There was still some level of mistrust. Mantel was, well, a Mantel and that meant he had to not trust him. The whole line of Mantels was full of conniving uppity vampires who thought they were better than everyone else. It was why when Sangui had formed, the Mantels were shut out for being too much of assholes.

But the buzzing was drawn to this particular Mantel. That couldn't be a good sign at all.

"I don't think it's impossible." Mantel held a branch away from his face and held it for Ren to pass through.

"But it's unlikely. I couldn't get a good look before you came, but I saw puncture wounds.”

Chills ran down Ren's spine. He wanted Mantel's first theory to be correct. An actively killing vampire could do so much more damage than an animal could ever do. To think something like this would happen outside Montis, it was hard to process. 

Vampires belonged in Sangui. There was no reason for them to be in Reginae.

They slowed as they came close to the spot. Ren saw the familiar path led into the small space. Inside the leaning trees, he saw the speckle of color against the black and brown. 

When Ren had found her and Mantel, he'd been blind to the smaller picture outlining the larger. Details he hadn't noticed before became crystal clear as he saw for the first time what was the dead the girl.

The river of blood had stopped flowing and her open eyes stood out from the rest of her. He didn't have to touch her to know how cold she was. Her solid chest, like a statue, was the eeriest of all. 

People were always moving. Living things, plants and all, had movement inside of them. The glaring different between the dead and the living was laid out in front of him.

He wished he could unsee it.