Tyla

Malyn volunteered to follow the bus on his bike, and Tyla didn't so much ask to ride with him as refuse to consider any other arrangement. After the fire last night, the threats made against Malyn, and then those long, hollow hours of not knowing whether Malyn was alive or hurt or worse, Tyla couldn't stand the thought of being parted from him again. Perhaps it was illogical. He knew that. But the moment he let himself imagine Malyn slipping out of his sight, something in his chest drew tight and would not loosen, and so he climbed onto the back of the bike, wrapped his arms around Malyn's waist, and held on. 

Shadow had lent Tyla some clothes—a dark t-shirt that hung loose through the shoulders and a pair of jeans he'd had to cuff twice at the ankle. They smelled faintly of laundry detergent and someone else's life, but they were certainly more appropriate for a motorcycle than his sleeping gown.

For the first stretch of the ride, Tyla tucked himself close against Malyn's back and let the road noise fill his head. The helmet muffled the world to a low, steady roar, and the engine hummed through his whole body with a familiar, almost soothing rhythm. He could feel the warmth of Malyn through the jacket, the shift of his ribs when he leaned into a turn. Malyn rode easily, one hand drifting off the handlebar now and then to squeeze Tyla's wrist where it rested against his stomach, and each time he did, something in Tyla settled a little further. 

But the longer they rode, the more the quiet of it gave his thoughts room to wander, and they wandered, as they so often did lately, toward the question of whether he belonged here at all. 

Sometimes Tyla couldn't shake the feeling that he simply wasn't built for this the way Malyn and Finch were. His childhood had been a soft, sheltered thing. As a boy he'd dreamed of growing into something braver, something out of the adventure stories he’d loved, and so he'd practised his shielding over and over in the garden, alone, casting barriers against the hedgerows and the stone wall at the bottom of the yard, because shielding was the closest thing to combat they'd ever permitted him to learn. Nothing that could hurt. Nothing with teeth. He'd stood out there for hours some days, palms aching, telling himself he was preparing for a world that, in truth, nobody had ever intended to let him see. 

Malyn had grown up roaming the forests, hunting for whatever he ate. And Finch—Tyla still felt the guilt of it every time he remembered asking about the brand on Finch's wrist. He hadn't understood what he was asking. Finch had walked through the kind of darkness Tyla hadn't known a person could survive, let alone emerge from with sharp wit and a kind spirit.

Neither of them had ever made him feel lesser for being different, though. That was the truth he kept having to remind himself of. The insecurity was a beast of his own making. They told him, often, that their differences were the whole point—that the not-being-the-same was exactly what made them strong—and he believed them. He did. It was just that believing something with your mind and feeling it in your body were not always the same thing. It was hard to know where he fit when Malyn and Finch slotted together like two faces of a single coin. They shared a sarcastic sense of humour that Tyla didn't always follow, only with Finch approaching it through an undertone of pessimism and Malyn with unrelenting, almost defiant positivity. They could hold entire conversations in glances and half-finished sentences, and Tyla would be standing right there, smiling, understanding none of it. 

All three of them—Malyn, Finch, and Adin—were so close. There were things Adin had kept hidden even from Malyn, certainly, but they had a depth of comfort between them that Tyla was still building.

Which was precisely why the jealousy was so absurd. They were letting him in. Slowly, surely, they were making room for him in their lives, in the strange little family they'd stitched together out of their separate pasts. That sort of belonging couldn't be rushed. It grew at its own pace.

The strangest part was that it hadn't always been like this. At the start he'd felt nothing but welcomed. The insecurity had crept in only recently and, if he was honest with himself, it was tangled up almost entirely in Malyn. 

After an hour or so on the road, Malyn pulled ahead of the bus, stuck his arm out to signal, and swung them off into the lot of a fast food store.

Everyone spilled off the bus, and the six of them started towards the doors together.

It was only as they reached them that Tyla glanced over and found the space at his side empty. He turned. Malyn had drifted off across the lot with Finch, the pair of them bent close in conversation at its far edge.

Irrational jealousy flooded up through him, hot and immediate—but then he crossed the lot to join them, and found they were only sorting out where they'd go to eat once the food was bought. Of course they were. Why did he keep feeling this way? He had no reason for it. None at all. He let out the breath he'd been holding and arranged his face into something pleasant before either of them looked up. 

Maybe it hadn’t settled quite right, because the smile Malyn gave him held an edge of something that might have been worry. Finch went on ahead and Malyn and Tyla followed, side by side.

Inside, Malyn took charge of ordering for everyone, and then they found a table and settled in to wait. 

"It's a shame I was already a vampire when I came here," Luther was said. He sat across from Tyla at the moulded plastic table, hands folded neatly on its surface like a man at a job interview, watching the rest of them with a mild, almost academic interest. "There are so many different foods here, and so readily available. When I was a human, we ate the same few things over and over, with only the occasional treat for special occasions." 

Malyn propped his chin on the heel of his hand and watched him with open, undivided fascination. "Does different blood taste different?" 

“Oh, yes, absolutely,” Luther said. “I have a source of rejected donor blood from the local blood bank. Or—had, I suppose. With people coming here from different worlds, there are all kinds of oddities that pop up during blood screenings that mean they have to throw otherwise perfectly good blood away. You can imagine how even something as simple as a novel blood type can complicate things. I’ve tasted some very exotic bloods in my time.”

"And now what're you going to do?" Finch asked, voice flat with the particular exhaustion he seemed to keep in reserve for Luther. "Can't go back to your source. Can't drink from us." 

“I can drink cow blood if I have to, and those things are just standing in fields all over the place.”

"You're gonna go bite a cow." 

"Don't be silly." Luther sounded almost offended. "You can draw blood from a cow as easily as you can from a human." 

“And a cow's just gonna let you do that?”

"No, of course not." Luther tipped his head toward the quiet end of the table. "Shadow can do it without waking a sleeping cow." 

Finch sent a glance that way, and Tyla felt a small jolt of surprise—he'd half forgotten Shadow was sitting there at all. Shadow, half hidden behind the dark of his sunglasses, gave one small nod. 

"Hm." Finch seemed to turn this over, looking for something to object to and coming up short. "Well. It solves the problem." 

“I’m so glad we have your approval, Finch.”

Finch shot him a flat look. "I swear it's as hard for you to put up with me being halfway decent to you as it is for me to do it. Every time I try, you're snide about it." 

"I do apologise," Luther said, serene as anything. "It happens so rarely, and so briefly, that I don't always notice." 

"Just… shut up until I've eaten," Finch muttered. 

"Okay," Luther said, and, to his credit, he did. 

A number was called over the counter. They went up in a small procession, gathered the food in a clatter of paper-wrapped burgers and waxed cups, made the last round of agreements about where exactly they were stopping to eat it, and split back off toward the lot.

At the door, Malyn glanced sideways at Tyla, bag of food balanced in one hand. "Want to take the bus this leg? Give your arms a rest?"

Tyla shook his head, once and firm.

Malyn didn't push him on it. He only shifted the bag to his other hand, held the door open with his shoulder, and let Tyla through ahead of him.