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The Devil's Nest, Friday Evening

The island had shifted again. At least this time there was no screaming sun to keep Allie from getting to work on time.

Which meant a pouting Tiny was back to washing glasses behind the bar while she supervised.

[OCD free!]

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"I can heal just about anything if I can concentrate enough," Peter answered. "And I've got the strength and speed and senses, too. I don't need much sleep at all, though; it's mostly just a habit."

He took a drink and then cocked his head at her. "So, what are rabids?" He hadn't forgotten.

"Control on a molecular level. Useful."

Allie took a drink from her bottle, using the pause to get her thoughts in order. "As far as I can tell, my world was a lot like the one we should hopefully get back to at the end of the summer. Then, about fifty or sixty years before I was born, Red Lung happened. It was a virus, and it killed millions."

[Zzzzz....]

Peter winced. "Sounds nasty."

[Taking that as sleep not boredom. :) SP?]

"From what the few old timers I knew said about it, it was," she agreed. "It got so bad that vampires started to wonder if they were going to lose their food source. At that time no one knew they were real. It was just myth and legend. But one vampire thought maybe vampire blood might be a key to a cure. So he went to the scientists studying the disease and told them what he was." Allie expression made it pretty clear how well that went.

"It didn't work out well, I take it?" It hadn't gone badly for Peter, but there were really different circumstances here.

"The way people were dying, I don't think anyone really cared about vampires being real. They had bigger things to worry about. Kanin, the vampire that first went to the scientists brought them other vampires and they started to experiment with vampire blood and the virus." As she spoke Allie's couldn't help but remember the lab she and Jackal had found abandoned in tunnels of Washington DC. The tables and the leather straps. The journal she'd found and the horrors she'd read in its pages. "Something went wrong. Instead of finding a cure, the dead started to rise as some bizarre hybrid vampire zombie like creature. They called them rabids."

"And then you had a virus and zombies." Peter grimaced.

"A virus, zombies, and a bunch of vampires that decided the best thing to do was declare themselves 'Princes', fortify various cities and then offer their protection to the few remaining humans. Of course that protection came with a price," she said bitterly. "Get bled regularly for some rations. It didn't matter how healthy you were. If you were due to give, the pets, the favored humans came for you. When I was ten, they came for my mother. It killed her."

Peter looked grim. That sounded like what a lot of the shadows in his world would have done, too.

"And you were on your own?"

"Pretty much," Allie shrugged. "I wouldn't let them do that to me. So there were no rations. I met up with a few other street rats and we did what we could to survive."

"I've been there," Peter said. "Not as a kid, but I can imagine." She didn't have to say any more if she didn't want to.

"What every you're imagining, it was probably worse." There was a reason she was barely an inch over five feet tall and a hundred pounds soaking wet. Years of near starvation would do that to you. "But I survived. I can be stubborn like that."

"That's the best way," Peter said. "Good for you."

"I know a few people that might argue about that," Allie said. "But I do have a question about the whole shapeshifting thing."

"They'd argue about being stubborn enough to survive?" Peter asked. "They sound like assholes."

He shrugged. "Shoot."

"Well when they were the ones trying to kill me, I can see where they might have a problem." Baby vampires with moral streaks didn't make friends with other vampires easily.

"When you say certain animals? I'm going to guess that a bat was one of them?"

"Yeah," Peter agreed. "Bat, wolf, rat. The 'unclean' animals. Why?"

"Ironically they're all pretty clean animals. And I know that about bats from experience." And a few too many nights streaming nature documentaries. David Attenbourgh's voice was soothing.

"How much have you heard about the island's bits of whimsy?"

Peter shrugged. "Tell that to the church. I don't know how they decided on it."

He eyed Allie curiously. "I've been told it has moods, and we might get strange weather, or changed into kids or the opposite sex or something. Bats, too?"

"Bats, puppies, the occasional bird. Take your pick," she said obviously amused. "Someone's probably spent a week or two as it. It's not bad, just annoying as hell when you suddenly find yourself back to normal in the middle of the preserve. Naked."

Peter grinned. "Fortunately I'm better at that." He looked around, but there was only the one other employee here, and it wasn't like his cover wasn't thoroughly blown anyway.

He changed entirely to mist, then a hawk (he was out of practice with bats), then back to himself - clothes and all.

Yes, Allie was pouting at that display. "Show-off!

"Maybe a bit," Peter agreed. "I have a friend who's managed it with his sword, too. He shifts it out when he needs it, sort of like carrying it invisibly."

He smiled a bit wistfully; he hadn't seen Kuromaku in a while, even before his time in Hell.

"I'd like to be able to do that. You'd never be caught defenseless," she said. "Speaking of swords, did you ever get one?"

"Not yet," Peter said. "But I did get a phone." He pulled it out of his pocket. "Still hard to believe this is a phone, but I have one."

"Oh I know, I felt the same when I first got here," she nodded. "What apps have you downloaded?"

"Um...none yet," Peter confessed. "I don't know what I'd use it for."

"There's so many! There's practical ones, there are games. How can you live without the Kindle app?" Allie asked, astonished.

"That does what, make light?" Peter guessed.

Hey, he was pretty sure it couldn't start a fire on its own.

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The Devil's Nest, Friday Evening

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