Despite vampires and fairies being mortal enemies.

Chanyeol lays deathly still on the too-small bed, staring aimlessly at the ceiling.

He can hear the controlled fury in Minseok's voice, muffled through the thick curtain portioning the loungeroom from the bedroom. Sori's voice fills the silence that follows. Her voice is insistent, but the cold and dangerously serpentine tone lingers all the same.

There's a shuffling of feet, and then Minseok emerges from the room, brow furrowed and nostrils flaring in suppressed rage. Chanyeol quickly closes his eyes, cracking an eyelid open to watch the elder vampire's silhouette stalk over to Hwan's door and let himself in.

Sori's footsteps are so quiet that Chanyeol wouldn't have heard them if he wasn't listening for them. Her last footfall lands somewhere in front of him, and then the scent of bluebells is wafting a centimetre from his nose.

Chanyeol hears the way her breath hitches as he allows his eyes to open, and suddenly her hand is pushed up against his lips, stemming his voice before it can burst forth. "You," she mutters, scowling half-heartedly. "I thought you were supposed to be asleep."

"Vampires don't sleep," he replies smoothly, taking her wrist in his hand and drawing her palm away from his face. Despite the obvious hostility in Sori's voice, he's surprised at how easily she cracks a grin. The grin is short-lived, though, as a twitch of movement draws Chanyeol's gaze over the fairy's shoulder. The mere action alone is enough for Sori's face to contort in the semi-darkness, and then the golden lily on her arm flares white.

His eyes flash red in silent warning as Areum's eyelids fall shut, her body slumping and falling back onto the mattress without a sound. "I beg to differ," Sori murmurs, a slow smile spreading across her face as Chanyeol sits up, peeling Sehun's arm from around his waist. "Don't you read, Chanyeol? Magic trumps anything the nosferatu can come up with."

Hearing her voice so unnervingly close to his face after the events of that night sends a shiver of unease through his stomach. "Wordless magic?"

A surprised raise of her eyebrows, and then her gaze falls onto her arm as she traces the golden tattoo with her index finger. "It takes practise," she says, holding her arm up for Chanyeol to see. It may just be the darkness, but the tattoo doesn't look like it's been inked; it looks like it's been seared into her skin.

She tugs her sleeve over the exposed skin before Chanyeol can lean closer. "And sacrifice. All magic has a cost."

He returns her gaze with a tilt of his head. "What did that spell cost you?"

"Nothing. And if anything, a night's worth of rest," she replies, tucking her hair behind her ear. "Most magic-wielders like to call it blowback. What I do to her, the magic pays back to me in full, but only for spells that have the potential to inflict harm."

Chanyeol drops his gaze. "So if you kill someone –"

Sori's eyes glance up, her eyes luminescent in the moonlight. "Then I will die in the same way that they do," she answers easily. "But the fairfolk only meddle in magic with the intention of healing. That's why the spell I cast on your friends did such a number on me." 

In response to the question scrawled all over Chanyeol's face, she brushes her hair over her shoulder, laying bare. Just above the harsh line of her collarbone is a small, black mark, shaped in the semblance of a snowflake. She catches the frown on Chanyeol's face and rolls her eyes. "It's a little hard to breathe, but it's nothing that I can't deal with."

Her shoulders jerk up to her ears as Chanyeol leans closer to examine the brand, his hand grazing the skin of her neck. He almost laughs at her obvious nervousness, but immediately dismisses it when a determined scowl wrinkles her face.

"It's too pretty to be a curse," he murmurs. It's true; upon closer inspection, each fractal has an intricately intertwined pattern enclosed within each line. Each marking is so close to the next that it's hard for his eyes to follow any individual pattern. In the centre is a name, written in cursive. Jadis. "Why a snowflake?"

"The person who taught me the hex is a witch of the ice," Sori says pertly, letting her hair fall over her shoulder. Chanyeol quickly retracts his hand as Sori leans back on her haunches, pulling her knees up to her chin.

"I would imagine that your neat little shadow-travelling trick isn't magic... but it's not a hex, nor is it a curse," she mumbles indistinctly, tugging her lip. With a wave of her hand, a book as thick as his thigh drops out of one of the numerous bookcases lining the walls and tumbles into her palm, laying open on a page drowning in mangled, unintelligible symbols. Chanyeol watches with half a smile on his face as the sound of cracking parchment fills the room. Sori's head nods up and down absently as her eyes peruse the pages.

"Upon the capture of a banshee? That can't be right. Beasts of magical nature, beautification potion, bigfoot fur and its applications in potion-brewing... black magic! Black magic is extremely uncommon, and is not without its own blowbacks, a characteristic not shared with – oh!"

Chanyeol lets a teasing smirk tug the corners of his lips up. Sori's eyes widen in realisation, a tickled blush flooding her cheeks. "Don't mind me," he says, catching his tongue between his teeth to stop himself from laughing. "Well?"

"What do you want, nosferatu?"

"You were saying, fairy?"

Sori's mouth opens to form a protest, but closes just as quickly as her curiosity overtakes her self-consciousness. The carved wooden clock hanging on the wall ticks past five minutes before Chanyeol finally gets a reply. "Well," she starts, voice low, like she's unwilling to break the silence. "I have a vague idea of what it could be. But I'll have to – may I?" She holds her hands up in a vague gesture, her expression jammed somewhere between intrigued and apprehensive.

Chanyeol pauses in consideration before nodding warily, and then her hands cup his face and her forehead, shockingly warm against his bloodless skin, presses against his. He jumps back, eyes wide. "What the –"

"Oh, do be quiet, you insufferable git. Just keep your eyes on me and your mouth shut," she snaps, shooting him an impatient glower. Her voice loses the dignified undertone as she opens her arms meaningfully, fingers twitching expectantly. He hears her chortle, a slight smirk gracing her lips. "I'm willing to bet that you've had your fair share of female relations, nosferatu. Why should a simple hug make you so high-strung?"

His pupils do a full revolution around their sockets as he moves forward, letting her lay her palms gently on the distinct lines of his jaw. The emerald of her irises melts into the darkness as she lids her eyes. Chanyeol shifts awkwardly as he finds her nose a hairsbreadth away from his. "If it's someone who sleeps around, then you're looking at the wrong person," he murmurs. He hears Sori breathe in, breathe out, and then her tattoo begins to shimmer. "You should meet Baekhyun sometime. I'm sure you two would hit it off immediately."

Nothing. No reply, and no response. Chanyeol lets the room go silent as the gold slithers up Sori's arm, enveloping the emblem in flames. Releasing a breath he wasn't aware he was holding, he lets his gaze wander over her face.

Fairfolk. Seeing her face so close to his helps him realise the meaning of their namesake. Everything about her, from the way her body seems to hold itself in complete and utter stillness, to the way she moves – with precise, punctuated movements that resemble nothing less than a predator stalking its prey – betrays the magical blood in her veins. Beautiful, he realises. She's beautiful, in the deadliest sense of the word. Beautiful, but in the same way that a snake is beautiful; the kind of beauty that waits until the perfect moment to strike the killing blow.

Then Sori's eyes flutter open and Chanyeol has to gather his scattered thoughts as her eyelashes skim the bridge of his nose.

"Incredible."

The word tumbles off parted lips, barely a whisper. Her eyes catch and hold his gaze. "Incredible," she repeats, drawing the pad of her thumb across the curve of his cheekbone; slowly, as if in fascination. Chanyeol lets himself go for a moment, staring unabashedly while she rocks back on her heels, conjuring a small orb of concentrated white light with a jumbled recital of syllables. It bobs up and down above her palm, pulsating hypnotically. "Hwan, hear me out."

Chanyeol's eyebrows shoot up his forehead as Hwan's gravelly voice emanates from the ball, the glow weakening and strengthening in tandem with the volume of his voice. "Pardon me, Sori," says Hwan, followed by a muffled scuffling of feet. The druid's voice is so clear that Chanyeol has to force himself not to look over his shoulder. "I have an exceedingly full agenda that I must return to shortly, and the vampire is proving to be very uncooperative."

"But –"

"No buts," Hwan chimes in, and then there's a strangled shout followed by the sound of something big and heavy falling over. "Oh, for Pan's sake –"

The pale radiance illuminating Sori's face goes dim as she curls her fingers over her palm. Grinding her teeth together, she tilts her head up to meet his eyes, albeit reluctantly.

"Want to tell me what that was all about?" Chanyeol asks, resting his pounding forehead in his palms. He can barely hear his own voice through the pain. A hint of a smirk crinkles his eyes when she averts her gaze, hands restless in her lap. "Little fairy, you can't expect me to not be curious after that little episode."

Annoyance flares in the depths of her pupils. "I appreciate the sentiment, but the nickname is entirely unnecessary," she says, rubbing her eyes tiredly.

Chanyeol can see the dark, hollow circles bruising her skin. In the harsh light of the moon, it makes her face look sunken, like a vacuum has taken a hold of her skin and is it back into her skull. She makes a half-hearted face at him, her irises an iridescent green in the sheen of the moon, and then the snarky expression melts off her face as she tilts her head to the side, like a bird investigating an object of intrigue. 

"Chanyeol? What's wrong?"

Through the haze of dull, throbbing agony and the voice in his head screaming for blood – for Sori's blood, for the feeling of his canines puncturing her neck, for the sweet release as her blood mixes with his saliva – he manages to grind out, "Thirsty," and the word seems to kick the fairy into gear. Seemingly unaware of her predicament, she nods briskly and hooks her elbows under his armpits, lifting