The Gift of the Fang

Hannah Anabol took one look at the body of the deceased and rolled her eyes. A man with a stake through his chest.

"How original." Hannah glared at Detective Reed Shirth across the autopsy table. "Do you do this with all the assistant medical examiners when our boss is out of town?"

"Just the new ones," he replied jokingly.

Hannah fought to keep her eyes from rolling out of her skull.

"Okay, okay, this is an actual body. The victim was already dead on arrival, so we kept the stake there so you can bag and tag," he explained dully. "I thought MEs were supposed to have a killer sense of humor."

"I'm not the medical examiner. I'm the assistant. I get to clean up after he displays his sense of humor," Hannah grumbled, before muttering resentfully, "I don't even get to work on the body when he's here."

"Today's your lucky day then," Shirth offered. "Sort of."

That was part was true. A dead body was a dead body; she was finally able to open one up herself. Hannah donned the latex gloves with a loud snap and went to work.

"Can I remove the stake?" Shirth asked with just a little too much excitement.

Hannah ignore him. She carefully but efficiently examined the head, looking in each orifice. Fangs in the mouth. Of course. One of them rolled out and fell to the ground before she could close the mouth.

"Great," she muttered, quickly reaching for an evidence bag. With her luck, the ME would be back before she made the first incision.

Shirth would not give up. "Please?"

Hannah went to the counter to look for a pen to label the bag. She called back to Shirth, "Fine, just don't complain if you get any blood on you. "

A grunt. Then a thump. Then silence.

Frowning, Hannah turned around.

The corpse was standing and staring back at her. Its crimson eyes were mesmerizing. Its cheekbones were sharper than the edges of a diamond. Its hair sat in glorious black waves above its broad shoulders. It had the body of Adonis, or more perhaps aptly, Hades, the overlord of the dead.

"That belongs to me," Hades uttered lowly, closing the space between them.

"Stay back!" Hannah exclaimed, instinctively clutching the evidence bag in front of her.

Hade's brow furrowed with consternation and then, with the most pained expression on his face, he begrudgingly stepped back.

Hannah blinked in surprise. Hades was glaring at her. Not, not at her, at her hands. The bag. The fang!

"Take another step back," she ordered cautiously.

He did.

Hannah took in the prone body of Detective Shirth and the stake on the floor.

"You're a vampire," she stated, her eyes round in her face.

The vampire replied through his clenched teeth, minus one fang, "Yes."

"As long as I have your fang, you have to do to what I say?"

He sighed dramatically. "Yes."

Hannah canted her head curiously, "You can't just take it away from me?"

"No, you have to return it to me," he growled.

Hannah slowly approached the vampire, circling him, making sure he wasn't going to attack her. She came closer and closer still until she could touch his cold, marble sculpted chest. The chest wound from the stake was healing right before her eyes. She ran her index finger down the wound and gazed up at him in wonder, her thick lashes a flutter.

"Your heart is the most vulnerable part of you?" she asked breathlessly. "Everything else just heals?"

Hannah felt his voice vibrate through her fingers as he uttered a low 'yes'. She peered up into his blood red gaze and smiled.

*

Shirth opened his eyes to a world upside down. He slowly got off the floor, blinking, taking in the familiar surroundings of the autopsy room. When he heard the male voice, he stiffened and reached for his gun, but his hands never made it to his holster.

"Careful, that's my liver," said the corpse, propped on his elbows on top of the metal slab.

Hannah gazed up from the mass of organs exposed through the Y incision on the corpse's chest. "My boss isn't very hands-on. It looks different from this point of view," she exclaimed in wonder.

Hannah reach for the scalpel again and hesitantly sliced through the left lung, pausing every few inches to adjust the grip while blood oozed out from the cut. She quickly sliced through the other lung like a pro. "That was pretty good," she praised herself, before mentioning the black tar coating the lung sacs. "Hey, Dave, your lungs are pretty trashed."

"I was a smoker, you know, from before," vampire Dave explained sheepishly.

"You're lucky your teeth didn't grow back yellow!" Hannah laughed, playfully punching Dave on the shoulder.

Dave chuckled. "Yeah, totally. Yellow teeth for eternity would be a complete bummer."

"Wait, don't move so much, your intestines are falling out."

"Oh, sorry."

"They are in pretty good shape though," Hannah complimented, whilst pulling out a section of intestines to examine it up close. "I've always wondered…have you ever measured them?"

Dave leered through the circle of intestines Hannah held up, "Well, I don't like to brag."

"That's funny. Haha." Hannah dropped long organs back into Dave's open cavity with a moist splat.

"Ow! That hurts my intestines and my ego," Dave groused.

Hannah giggled.

"Aurghhhhhhhh!"

Hannah and Dave turned at the unexpected sound of Detective Shirth repeatedly losing his lunch over the sink.

"No sense of humor, that one."