He’s never been to Disneyland. During the creation of the very first - of what would later be many - amusement parks, Kieran had only remembered visiting his brothers’ tombstones and trying to keep their sorry vampire souls up to date with events of the 20th century. Not that they cared so much, but it lifted what was left of Kieran’s spirit when he lost himself in conversation with all six of his deceased brethren. Needless to say that, by the mid-nineteen hundreds, the witch-hunting and vampire-hunting periods had stopped - this he mentioned frequently, as it would often be the source of much of his third brother Allen’s anxiety attacks - and there was an industrial revolution of some sorts, and their mother’s one thousandth birthday had come around during the springtime. Oh, and he had picked up a new profession that was bringing in lots and lots of money. He knew they’d enjoy that part.

So no, Kieran doesn’t recognise Disneyland when they arrive. He can’t quite understand the arching gateways of a magical fantasy world created by the friendly clash of intuitive minds and entrepreneurial spirits, though some part of him nods respectfully as Alta rambles on in the backseat about how Disney had managed to enslave her childhood with princesses and singing deer. He finds a parking space as she begins humming a tune and notes that, despite the time, more than half of the parking slots are full. Fireworks already dot the sky, wisps of shooting yellow sparks hidden between the indistinguishable amalgamations of smoke and cloud that give off a ghostly aura under the glow of a waxing gibbous.

“Shall we go?” Kieran hums, whipping out the tickets.

“We shall indeed.” She dramatically replies, swinging her foot out of the open door.

Strangely enough, he picks out a familiar sound - or voice, rather - amongst the murmuring noise of visitors and employees that scatter across the theme park’s broad pathway. On one side, a movie-themed haunted house glares with eerie green eyes at Kieran’s long trench-coat. On the other, a pleasant tea-cup cruise along coffee-coloured waters sprays both him and his niece in fine, refreshing mist. Either way, he tunes out the noise to find a distinctive laugh and smile wandering aimlessly across several rides, accompanied by the shrill but equally jovial tune of a woman’s incessant giggling.

“My god,” Kieran stops as his wandering thoughts come to a halt. “It’s the parasite.” 


“The what?” Alta stumbles forward, having absentmindedly followed Kieran’s approximate pathway until bumping into his broad back.

“Oh, hey! It’s the guy that gave us free tickets. We should say hi.”


“That’s a terrible idea.” The vampire curls his lip with distaste. “I know all too well of your intentions.” 
“My intentions?” She replies with a cheeky grin. “I didn’t say I had any.” 


With a swing of her arm she pushes Kieran along, heartily ignoring his growing protests until they near the pair and a familiar face looks up with a furrowed brow, eyes wary but mouth pushed into an affable smile.

“May I help you with anything?” The man says. Kieran opens his mouth, trying frantically to come up with a snarky remark - it has to do with a parasite, it can’t sound like it’s been prepared or done before - but Alta butts into the conversation with an extended hand.

“We came at night.” She beams at him, eyes shining with wet lustre. He’s never seen her so excited. “As you suggested. Just wanted to say thanks.”


The man’s once sunburnt-red complexion is gone and Kieran spies a hint of dark blonde stubble dotted across a four-o-clock shadow that wasn’t there before. He’s a lot shorter than Kieran initially assumed - though perhaps that may have been because the vampire was cooped up in a car and the other man had stooped down to pass two tickets through a half-open window. With a piercing gaze, the vampire meets his eyes, exhaling a sigh of exasperation and sticking his hand out awkwardly. It hits the employee’s chest with a bump, having miscalculated their distance.

“Thank you.” Kieran grimaces. “We came here on account of her terrible party.”

“Oh.” The employee stares, most likely surprised that they actually showed, before taking his Kieran’s hand. “Oh. Wow. I’m Sam.”

He breaks into what looks like an embarrassed grin, laughing, hand reaching for the back of his neck and eyes drawn downwards before initiating the handshake. There’s something off about the way he acts unsettles Kieran. Maybe it’s the mannerisms that differ so greatly from when their first encounter - then again humans have the tendency to do unprecedented things anyways, and so the vampire shrugs it off.

Alta kicks him.

“I am Kieran.” He manages with a scowl, wincing at the bruise beginning to form on his shin.

“I’m Sam.” Sam blurts again. “You’re the vampire. I’m sorry, I couldn’t tell-” and he waves frantically at his own face, mimicking the layered scarves Kieran had worn on Alta’s first day of school, “because of the - thing. Fancy meeting you here! You came. I wouldn’t have expected- huh.”

“You are forgiven.” Kieran sighs, turning to leave, yet Alta grips his forearm so tightly he begins to suspect that the vampire blood in her veins is beginning to boil. She sends him a quick glare before revealing a more angelic facade to the Disney employee.

“I’m Alta.” She says sweetly. Sam promptly ignores her and Kieran can’t help but feel a sense of triumph in his heart as her beaming smile fades into one of mild irritation.


“This your daughter?”

“God forbid,” Kieran snorts. “I wouldn’t know what to do with her if she was.”


“Oh. I see.” Sam almost looks relieved before the woman that was previously with him - her presence so invisible that the three of them ignored her entirely - pinches the hem of his shirt before motioning hurriedly to the amusement ride across from them.

“Hey, before I go-” The man says, reaching into his pocket and fumbling around in his pocket. Within seconds he pulls out a card and places it into the palm of Kieran’s hand.

“You dropped something.”

In the spur of the moment, Kieran’s hand closes around the card, looking up perplexed.

Sam winks.

— -

“I can’t believe my brooding, depressed, hitman uncle got hit on.” Alta can’t seem to stop talking about it on their way to the haunted mansion just a few meters away, and though it gets on Kieran’s nerves he can’t help but reply the moment her excited smile was rejected in the most brutal but indirect way possible. Perhaps it’s schadenfreude, leaking into his personal life. “You weren’t even nice to him. You were awful. You were so rude. I’m telling all my friends.” 


“You will tell your friends that I wasn’t rude,” Kieran replies haughtily, crunching the card into his palm as he stuffs it in his pocket. “Or you will not tell your friends at all. I was as nice as you allowed me to be.” 


“You called him a parasite!” Her phone goes off like a rocket; she furiously types back responses.

“Not to his face.” The vampire shrugs. “And I wasn’t hit on. I don’t know what that means in any context other than the only one I’m familiar with.” 


“He wants to date you, uncle Kieran. He likes you. He gave you his phone number.”

“Physical attraction can be so dreadfully shallow.” Kieran rolls his eyes.

“Don’t- did- did you just roll your eyes?” Alta stops, arms akimbo, eyes slanted in a curious and exasperated gaze. “You’re six hundred years old. I feel like you’ve lost the privilege.” 


“What can I say?” He throws his hands into the air. “Your terrible habits are beginning to rub off on me.” 


Their free ride is about as scary as a child’s over exaggerated re-telling of a simple nightmare: at one point it seemed as if the whole thing had a point, that is to say there was a story that was actually getting somewhere, but eventually the sheer amount of jump-scares and diluted red paint overwhelms Kieran with a sense of boredom and he finds his eyes fluttering closed as the next swamp monster appears before them. With a flicker of light, a well-timed banshee jumps forward, millimetres from Kieran’s face and he winces at the screaming that rings in his ears. The banshee’s hands reach for his face but never touch him - of course, there’s a safety policy, Kieran reminds - and he allows himself a small chuckle of victory as her fingers attempt to graze the tip of his nose.

“You may try,” He looks down at her disdainfully as the banshee dissolves into the ground. “But you will never succeed.”

Ahead of them, Kieran hears the sound of metal clinking. Something’s being lowered from the ceiling but he can’t quite tell what it is in this darkness and squints his eyes to see. At this point, sheer desperation makes up most of his anticipation; he’s counted the number of times skeletons have emerged from swampy depths, made note of the same actors that substitute the same banshee costume, and tried to make conversation with Quill at one point but the ride is so shaky he nearly drops his phone into the ‘river waters of hell’.

He counts the seconds that pass like minutes, into hours, until every minute is an hour waiting for its hellishly slow end. The darkness becomes his saving grace, soothing in its simplicity - tuning out the screams, he concentrates his mind on the peaceful sound of water waves lapping against their steel carriage as the ride continues forward and down another tunnel.

Then Alta grabs his hand, twists the flesh in her fingers, and screams.

It’s so unbearably loud that Kieran thrashes, backwards, arms flailing frantically as her voice explodes into ringing pain in his head and he jolts forward, the seatbelt ripping away from his chest. With a cry and a harsh metal clang, he stumbles to his right, hip bumping into the carriage railing. A shadowy figure emerges from the dark beside him and, in his panic, he swings his body harshly- Kieran’s elbow connects with a decaying jaw as a zombie flies across the moving set and crashes into the front of the carriage with a resounding crack. The screams behind Alta, once shrill with thrilling ecstasy, falter as the zombie groans a real, human groan.

“Oh, god!” Comes an alarmed yell from behind an incoming wall of bloody daggers. “John?” The generic haunted house soundtrack comes to a jittering, crackling stop as a closet door to Alta’s right is flung open and a mummified corpse leaps in front of Kieran. “John, you alright?”

“I’m okay,” the zombie coughs, rasping, “Shit, my head.”

“He’s bleeding. Stop!” The mummified corpse flails his arms into the air and at once the moving set is awash in bright yellow light, flooding every shadowy crevice of fake cobweb and dusty corner. “Stop! Real blood! Real blood!”

Kieran stumbles forward with a rasping breath, heartbeat still pounding in his ears as he whips his head towards his niece. She gapes a silent response.

“Well.” He pants, catching his breath. “that was rather emersion breaking."

— -

Maybe Disneyland isn’t as ideal as they thought.

Alta staggers over a bridge, below them a lake that glows fluorescent waters and shimmers with neon light pathways underneath sifting sand. After quickly fleeing the scene - of crime - the pair ran as far as they could in the opposite direction, against the current of the few hundred Disneyland goers now heading towards the exit. No one seemed to care about where they were going - not that it was anyone’s business other than theirs.


“That was my fault.” Alta groans, resting her head on her arms as she leans over the stone railing. Her face, illuminated by the majestic waters of Cinderella’s Castle moat, is lined with creases of distress and her drawn-out groan scares the fish beneath her away.

“It was.” Kieran takes a place beside her. “I blame everything on you.”

“I’m so sorry.” She sighs, dragging a hand through her hair. “Oh, god,” and she pulls - “I’m a real mess today. The party was shit and Disneyland’s shit, and that’s on me too.”

“Utterly you.” The vampire pats her back. “Breathe slowly and confess.” 


“Uncle Kieran,” she looks up at him, near-teary eyed. “Karen didn’t come to the party.” 


He doesn’t know who Karen is. He doesn’t really want to care, either, but her bottom lip trembles in a terrifying way that he can only recognise as complete and utter helplessness. In some way, the feeling resonates with him at his very core- the slanted brow, the doleful look, a lingering shudder of regret and frustration. If only she didn’t have her mother’s eyes.

“Are you in love.” He states.

“Maybe.” She sniffs.

“Oh, bother.” He pinches the bridge of his nose, sucks in a breath, and opens up his arms. Within minutes he envelopes the shape of her. The lingering smell of root-beer taints her lips and they smother his shoulder.

“She’s so disgusting.” Alta’s voice muffles into his shirt. “I hate her so much. I hope she dies.” 


“Okay.” He pats. “Me too.”

It hadn’t occurred to him just how tranquil the night was until her weeping breaks the silence. Above them sprawls a broad expanse of stars; under them, the same twinkle of artificial light blinks back at the natural scenery. In the distance two employees yell faintly at their figures, beckoning for them to leave.

Kieran closes his eyes and imagines, for a moment, that Alta is not who she is. That her hair is rougher than combed, her arms wiry instead of slender, her stomach muscular instead of soft. That she is a brother, not a daughter - a man and not a girl, that in some universe the gods let one boy live and be held softly to the tune of a keening lullaby. His arms - once tense and reluctant - soften in their hold.

“Don’t cry now, Alta,” he hugs her tightly, hands clawing into her skin. “You are still alive.”