Be Wary of Strangers, Part 8

Apologies for the lateness; I'm getting over being sick, and man alive my Nano project (read: characters) are absolutely refusing to cooperate... 😒

---

Vampire: Loki/Thor x Reader
Part Eight

You’re upstairs in the library when you hear the front door scrape open. You rub your shoulder and the knife you have strapped to your side. Since visiting the vampire, and the wolf attacks, you just haven’t felt safe without it.
Hurrying downstairs, you head into the living room. Loki lays sprawled on one of the couches, eyes closed. The morning sunlight casts odd shadows about the place.
“Hey,” you say, unable to keep an angry edge out of your voice.
Loki sighs. “What happened to the door?”
“Wolves.”
“Wolves.” He frowns. “How long have I been gone?”
“A week. More or less.”
Loki leaps up, obviously forcing himself to keep his eyes open. Cursing, he stumbles past you and to the basement entrance.
“He’s fine,” you call after him. “He’s been fed.”
Loki pauses, shoulders hunched. “Are you infected?”
“Nope.”
He looks like he doesn’t believe you. “All the same, I’d like…” A huge yawn keeps him from speaking for a few seconds. “I’d like to test you.” He continues without waiting for a reaction. “I need to contact the carpenters, restock from the hospital—”
You follow him as he absently wanders into the kitchen. “Don’t you want to know how he was?”
Loki’s red-rimmed eyes attempt to focus on you. “I can deduce well enough. The door, plus your desperation to enter the basement alone…he was not well.”
“Don’t you want details?” Your voice is high in disbelief. “He’s your brother! A vampire! A starving one. And you haven’t asked a single question about him!”
Loki sinks into a kitchen chair and rubs his face. “Fine. How was he?”
“Starving. And missing social life.” You sit down across from him. “He managed to give himself a bath.” Pointedly, you look at him.
He stares back vacantly. “What?”
You sigh, unable to maintain your annoyance at him. He looks like he hasn’t slept since he left. He looked like that before he left, as well…
“I just think you should visit him more,” you say.
“Is that all?”
You nod. “Um…do you need help getting upstairs?”
“I’m fully capable of getting to bed myself,” he says with a wry smile. “However ill I look.”
You watch as he stumbles up the stairs, waiting for him to roll right back down. When he totters, and braces himself against the wall for a full minute, you rise and offer him your shoulder.
For a moment, he looks resentful. Then he accepts your aid. Once you get to his room, he nods. “Thank you.”
“You’re welcome. See you tonight?”
“If I happen to wake up, yes.”
You turn in shortly after; the night before, you’d been to visit Thor again, and you’d left greatly unsettled. Maybe it was the way he looked at you. Maybe it was the way he’d taken the containers of blood, and let his hands linger on yours.
You put on your pajamas and wrap yourself in the bedsheets, feeling oddly lonely. Your thoughts turn to your sister. “Hope you’re getting better, Bria,” you mutter to the un-curtained window. “Sleep well.”
***
Despite being dead tired, Loki wakes in the early evening. Unsettled dreams and over-exhaustion kept him from sleeping soundly. Feeling as if he would never stop cursing, he heads to the library.
Endymion had said that blood would aid in healing. The fresher the blood, the quicker the healing. The fresher the blood, the faster Thor would be able to gain control of himself.
Loki unconsciously glances to where the girl’s room is. “One more mortal. What’s one more?” he mutters to himself.
During his visit with Endymion, he had taken notes. He pulls the torn and slightly water-stained papers that he had jotted notes on from his pocket. For a moment, he is unsettled. I could have sworn I'd used a notebook, not just scraps, and kept it within a plastic wrap so such damage would not occur.
With a grunt of displeasure, he sits at his desk and does his best to transcribe his barely legible notes into the margins of a larger book of vampire lore.
Thud.
Putting it down to nerves, he continues without pause.
Thwump.
“Odin’s beard, what now?” He rises, an offensive spell readied and glowing in his hand. The girl wanders in the hall, eyes half closed. “Oh, a somnambulist. Wonderful.” He disarms the spell and carefully approaches her.
As he nears, he senses something. Or rather, sees something. A shadow, hovering about her. A very familiar shadow. “Thor,” he growls. “What powers have manifested now?”
Loki puts his hands gently on the girl’s shoulders and guides her to his room. It’s closer than the library, and the girl’s room. As she passes by the iron and silver crosses embedded in the door frame, the shadow about her dissipates slightly. The girl sighs and begins to go limp.
He hurriedly dumps her onto his bed.
“Let’s see, vampires, haunting, dreams…” Loki flips through several bedside books in an attempt to guess what Thor is doing. He glances up and notes that the shadow is becoming more substantial. And more fondling.
“Hang it all.” He opens a drawer and retrieves a bottle with tinted liquid. He sprays it over the girl. “Bad vampire, bad vampire,” he chides, feeling a tad ridiculous.
The shadow seems to see him, then vanishes. The girl’s eyes close fully. She sighs as if in relief and curls up on the sheets.
Loki sits on the edge of the bed for a minute, nose wrinkling at the heavy and unpleasant scent that now permeates the air: garlic, lavender, hyssop, mustard, and several other herbs that never should have been steeped together.

Loki quietly bangs his fist against the desktop. Feeling rather childish—and not caring—he stands forcibly. He hisses, “If my room is going to smell like this, so is Thor’s!”