Followers of Set (Warning: Contains NSFL)
May 26, 2014 18:17:17 GMT -8
Barnaby Cuthbert and AST Jenne/Cullodena Duff like this
Post by The Mouth on May 26, 2014 18:17:17 GMT -8
26th May, 2014
Seattle, WA
He Dreams. He Remembers.
1st of August, 2013
Limerick, Ireland
It’s 5am and Katherine and I are tangled in the silk sheets of her hotel bedroom. She stopped by to deliver some of the items necessary for my scheme; thaumaturgical vessels that preserve blood perfectly for months on end and a special device that restores it to the conditions as if it had just left the body. It even keeps the narcotics and other goodies from breaking down.
“Katherine, I had to admit I’m getting passing fond of you…” I murmur as I nip at her neck. She sighs and arches into me, increasing our skin contact. “Same back at you Francis.”
We are as far from a Gothic vampire romance as we can get; neither of us are pretty, skinny, or in my case pale beauty frozen for all time in a mask of moon-lit flesh. She is a slightly overweight Jewish woman, overly tall, skinny arms and wide hips. I’m solidly rotund, to say the least, and very forgettably British in my look and demeanor.
We fell into this because in our ways we are very similar. We both are driven, ambitious, and utterly convinced the game is explicitly rigged against us. Makes winning all that more important.
“Did you put out the do not disturb sign? Don’t need housekeeping interrupting our rest…” she asks me, licking a little of the drying vitae from my chest.
“Of course I did.” We can both feel the weight of the sun rising; pushing consciousness down and down until we hit that oblivion point. Her body goes still and soft while mine stays slightly warm with a slow heartbeat.
In the middle of the day I wake up screaming, covered in a blood sweat - The smell of meat burning strong on my tongue; Von Graff’s head sliding from his body with a wet thump. His killer is always a different person but they all used a Roman sword to make the kill. I know he said a name before he died, if only I could remember it.
I must remember!
My nightmare at this point usually revolves around my loss of memory, adjustment of perception, until black is white and none of my allies are recognizable as anything but tools on the board. My little visit with my daughters seems to have knocked a few cobwebs in my brain loose.
Katherine stirs beside me, sleepily she inhales and mumbles “Frzz, al’right?”
I mutter re-assurances and we fall back to sleep; that evening we take a shower to clean the blood off me; she does a ritual to remove our traces from the room and I bag all the sheets and pillows for later incineration. We brought our own just for this purpose; no one can say we aren’t careful little vampires.
“Meet me at the usual time and place, later this week?” she asks as we drag our luggage through the lobby of the hotel.
“Of course, my dear. Wouldn’t miss it for the world. Shall I make it a real stinker?” I give her a little smile; our pass fail is terrible puns. One, non-native speakers struggle with them. Two the joke is referential to our last assignation; it is always one we’ve heard from the other person and we have to match the punchlines. Again, hard to crack even by getting into our heads because which joke am I going to use and/or can they program the response correctly?
Even better we have a whole code based on a bad joke. Anything that starts with ‘Why did the…” is a duress indicator.
Katherine pecks my check before getting into the cab and whispers, “Of course” in my ear. A short but fierce hug later and she is gone.
I go back to my safehouse and continue to educate the girls. Tonight we will be playing ‘spot the liar’.
***
3rd of August, 2013
I’m meeting Katherine at our favorite cafe. We like this one because in the evening they serve wonderful craft beers and little hand pies; they smell divine when taken together and the girls would likely enjoy me taking some home. Despite my protestations they tend to call me Grandfather in private and ‘Daddy’ in public. A week in and they are already driving me batty.
But I still smile when I think about how good Rabbit has gotten at lifting a wallet or that Jory is a gifted sifter of lies. Hannah has improved her blade work immensely; their parents cannot complain that I’ve stinted on their educations. They all hate ‘science time’. History hour is also not their happy place.
I’m still smiling when I take my seat at the cafe; I order for Katherine and myself. The waitress is a local lass who has all the boys circling with stutters and stammers I’m sure. After ten minutes Katherine arrives.
I stand and pull her chair out, a piece of social etiquette from our youth that we both find charmingly anachronistic. She takes her seat with a murmur of thanks and both lean in to appear to be a couple on their third date. In actuality it is more like our ninth, but we both have been nervous to confront what is happening between us.
We make small talk until the waitress lays our ales on the table which is our cue to give the passkeys that announce all is safe with us.
“Katherine, I heard the most awful joke the other day.”
Her eyes sparkle, brown and surprisingly warm. “Oh, how awful?”
“How many prostitutes does it take to screw in a lightbulb?”
She gives the answer right away, “Just one? But she charges extra for the kinky stuff.”
I mock good hearted chagrin. “Okay, you’ve heard that one. Do you have one in return?”
Katherine smiles and in a very flirting tone, just like the one where she asked me to inspect her hotel room for ‘hidden devices’ last week, she says, “What do you call a chicken crossing the road?”
The patrons are shocked when I vault the little chain cordoning off the outdoor area of the restaurant. A simple glance back shows me Katherine, looking shocked then enraged; like she’d been tricked.
The answer to the joke is ‘Poultry in motion’. We chuckled over that one; then built a response trigger of ‘flee’ into it. Who ever they were, they had Katherine and had managed to get to her level 2 info; which meant some serious work being done on her.
Protocol was to evade, entirely, avoid vehicles and stick to mass transit. But I wanted to save her…
I ran, dodging and diving and ducking. A guy my size should not be so light on his feet; being a vampire has it’s benefits. Being a Ventrue more so - I can do this for a week.
Thirty minutes later and I’m roughly 3 miles away; where I’m not sure. The conditioning is flee; how long is a little fuzzy. I’m standing in front of a house in the middle of a development; Ireland had a housing boom at the same time as the states as influx of cheap borrowing flooded the market with home buyers. Like the States there weren’t enough houses for everyone to be happy and the idea of owning land is even stronger in Ireland than in the U.S. In fact the U.S. has a milder form of the ‘ownership’ need; in Ireland it is nearly fetishistic.
Of course after the collapse this left ‘zombie developments’ - Entire housing projects with a few houses finished and the rest either lots and half built and left to rot. The collapsing banks were stuck holding the bag on collateralized properties with little intrinsic value and no one with enough credit left to do even minor developments on the lots.
So they rotted on the vine; somehow my little run lead me here.
Should be a good place to hide while I think about my next step (why am I hiding in a remote and hard to access place with no people around) and plan out how I’m going to rescue Katherine.
I go inside the house and walk past the granite countertops and the shredded walls were some Travelers or hoodies ripped out the plumbing. Basement, best place to hide. I go down the basement and thankfully the lights work (Why would they, this place is abandoned) and I go downstairs.
There in the floor of the basement is Katherine sitting on a steel frame chair, her hands are cuffed to the armrests and her feet are tied to a metal staple set in the concrecrete. A swarthy man in a leather jacket has a sawed double barreled shotgun pressed to the side of her neck. She’s naked, and I can smell burned meat and see weals and charred flesh; heated wire coat hangers most likely.
Tracks of dried blood are flaking on her cheeks.
I walk down the last few stairs and turn the corner and I see the waitress from the bar; I blink and it is a woman with dusky-pale skin with that North African look to her. As soon as I see her I blink and the Summons leaves me - I whirl and I hear the click of hammers coming back; other men with that East Mediterranean look, large men with shotguns and machetes. The click was the hammers on the shotgun pressed to Katherine’s neck being pulled back.
“I am Banafrit; strip and sit in your chair.” She points to a chair around the back side the stairs facing Katherine.
I gauge my odds, four ghouls and probably two Kindred; one with clearly high end Presence capacity and some moderate Obfuscate.
I kick off my shoes, then remove my jacket, my shirt, my knives, two pistols, a couple of other odds and ends. Then the trousers, underwear and socks; I’m pointed to sit in the chair. Quickly my ankles are leg cuffed, chained to the staple. My arms are secured to the armrests and I’m left to stare at Katherine.
“Sorry about this Kath-” A shotgun butt knocks my head, “Silence!” hisses my personal shotgunner. I say nothing but I track my eyes to his; he knows enough to look away. But he catches the edge of my gaze and flinches.
Twenty minutes later Katherine or her double comes down the stairs, she is swearing in some Middle Eastern dialect. “He knew, somehow! I lost him… Wait, how did he get here?” She is truly surprised to see me.
“I caught him,” Banafrit says from the corner. She has been preparing something this whole time and her boys drag a table over. Ah, the Presentation of the Instruments. Someone read a field manual or three.
“Halima, I’ve been netting fools like him for decades. He had a code with Katherine; what she gave up was the burn codes. But I arranged to meet him briefly before the meet and came here. Ten minutes into his run and I ‘asked’ him to come visit,” Banafrit is the dominant partner.
Halima releaxes and she goes from a perfect copy of Katherine to a very likely one in poor lighting. Fleshcrafting and Obfuscate? Unsure.
“It doesn’t matter how you got him Banafrit, what are we going to do with them both?” Halima is also young, impatient, and a little too focused on Banafrit. Sire/Childe relationship? No, partners but senior/junior.
“I’ll torture them, as contracted, then kill them as our employers specified.” Banafrit is all business but she gets a little excited; her eyes flutter a little. Halima is a little disconcerted; she likes the game and the chase but is squeamish about the results.
“Fine. I’ll be upstairs. You have the internet up?”
Banafrit sighs, ever so slightly. “Yes.” Halima somewhat gratefully runs upstairs.
“She’s not used to the work yet?” I ask in a conversational way. My keeper moves to club me again when Banafrit raises her hand.
“And what would you know of the ‘work’ little Ventrue?”
I chuckle. “All sorts, really. Like I know that I will not lie to you and will answer any questions you ask. I know that torture works. I know that my best hope is to feed as much information to you as possible but only things things you ask about. My volunteering things is a hint that we’ve gone into fantasy land.”
She nods slowly. “And you know I’m going to do it anyway. The torture.”
“Of course. But I have to ask, why two employers?”
She flinches, just a little. I press on, “Clearly you were hired by Katherine’s immediate superior to make herself and me disappear; easy enough. But you are torturing us. The longer you put off that final death the more chances we have to ruin your evening. Torture implies informational need; which implies gaps in knowledge. Katherine’s management does not need that information; they pull it from her mind. They want us disappeared, likely for tales I’ve been telling and some of the research Katherine has been doing.”
Banafrit is now openly a little shocked.
“How are you…”
“Logic. Holmesian logic. I’m a different case. You kept Katherine to leverage me. I’m a bonus two-for-one process; another party hired you to learn my plans. That party is confused because I’m doing all the right things in the wrong way; too damned fast. I’m running through a game at some kind at a blur, disrupting their slow methodical plans. They know it, and I know it. And I pegged their interest when I skewed a long con in Liverpool.”
She pauses. “You knew I was coming, didn’t you?”
I shrug. “Someone like you.”
She shakes her head. “Normally I’d present the instruments, but I guess we can skip that.”
So she did. I’ll skip the precise details; only to say that she was gifted. Torture is often done by specialists for a reason. Too much and the subject dies, too little and the subject is empowered to resist. It is a psychology of its own. To be a Kindred or a Ghoul older than a decade or three is to know torture at some point.
That evening she tested my resolve against fire, having my flesh marred, scarred, and losing an eye. She learned that I would parcel out secrets to prevent Katherine from getting worked over and would hold everything back when they worked on me; Banafrit bought into my little barter economy rather quickly.
The same time I was learning about her and Halima. There was a third vamp in the basement.
He stayed back until the next night.
Katherine and I were left alone for a few moments before dawn. We struggled to stay awake and they made no bother to gag us. I suspect because were being recorded. “Katherine?”
“Yes, Francis?”
“Were you crying for me?”
This gets a choked laugh from her. “A little pretentious, I get tortured and cry a little and you think it’s about you?”
I laugh a little too.
“Yes, Francis. I shed a tear or two for you. Not very pragmatic of me; but I do rather enjoy your company.”
“I think you’re cool too, Katherine.”
She giggles at that. “Too long in America, I’m afraid, Francis…” she trails off as the sun pulls us down.
I wake up on our second night. I quickly go over what I’ve learned and what they have learned. They know I’m on a mission.. They know I’ve been playing different identities. They don’t know about the girls. They might soon though, as the girls will come looking and they are not ready for this kind of crowd; they would hesitate too much in killing what needed to be killed.
What they don’t know are my resources and personnel; they expect my timeline to be years or a decade, which is a rush job to them. Hah.
Tonight is going to be rougher; they will try to break us down hard. The initial test and observation period is over; now the third man man is going to step out. Let’s see what his tools are.
Shortly after Katherine wakes we are swarmed over by a different set of ghouls; three men and one woman. They are hauling a pretty blonde with them; the waitress from the pub. Katherine and I recognize her immediately, Katherine closes her eyes because we both have a sense of the waste that is about to happen.
They cuff the waitress to another staple on the floor then leave. Twenty minutes later they bring down a young lad; Middle Eastern or North African. They staple the boy to the floor as well; him I do not know.
The ghouls are a seedy and rattish lot, the girl with them has a lot of piercings and screams ‘I was abused by mom’s boyfriend’ - She’s carrying a lot of rage and has been told that she can do what she wants to people when the leash is let off. She’s the easiest to read but the three men, of varying ethnic backgrounds and size all have a similar feel to them. Their master comes down and they all smile, jittery with excitement.
Their master is a pimp; I could not say if he was or not but he had the soul of a slaver and a pimp. You could see it; he owned people. They weren’t things, they were people still, but he owned them and he really liked to see what he could get them to do so as to demonstrate his ownership over them.
He was also a ginger. I try hard not to hold that against him; know plenty of perfectly fine gingers. But this one is grade A pimp asshole.
“We are going to play a game,” he starts, a forked tongue slipping between his lips. His followers giggle. His voice is smooth, surprisingly deep, and very South England.
“Stop.” I hold his eyes. The tongue means he could paralyze me, but he won’t.
“Sorry?”
“Seriously. Setites. Why are you all hell bent on being evil fuckers? At the embrace do you all get a copy of the Evil Overlord’s Guide to Success?”
He smiles and walks over, casually.
His tongue flicks out and I feel a burn on my cheek, running down to my neck, then the sliding rasp of the tongue as it gathers the vitae oozing from the wound.
“We are going to play a game, which means rules. Rules are simple, we are going to hurt the pretty lady and the boy. When you want it to stop happening to them you tell us a secret and then we do it to you for a while. Then we do something new to the boy and the girl, until you tell us a secret… And so on. The winner is whichever the two of you takes the most punishment to keep your partner alive the longest.” I can feel his tongue in my ear.
“Winner gets to eat, loser gets to starve. Simple enough.”
“Can I get your name sir?” I manage to get out past my revulsion. Bastard saw our empathy yesterday; wants us to volunteer info to compare to yesterdays intel.
“Why? So you know what to scream later?”
“No, so I can write in my journal ‘Dear diary, today I killed a ginger cunt named…”
He laughs. “Call me Tyler, meat.” Tyler whistles, his boys throw a cloth bag over the heads of the waitress and the boy, and the muscle from yesterday comes down to change our restraint arrangements from the chair to upright spread eagle. Weird, why doesn't he want Banafrit's people knowing who the captives are? I can tell the muscle hates this guy and his crew. They are pros and he is the ‘mad dog’ used to threaten people after exposure. ‘Oh, you don’t want to talk to me? Let me get Tyler’ is the line I sense coming.
Katherine knows it too. We are naked, helpless, and at the mercy of these second rate Bond villains. They will force their will and mark their power on us.
Tyler gives the nod and his people swarm over the waitress and the boy. Tyler reads their I.D.s out, “Tiffany Laughlin, 326 Kilkenny Lane. Oh look, Tiffany is the oldest child. Perhaps when we are done here we can visit her little brother and sister.” Tiffany, our waitress, cries and screams a little louder. The ghouls are ripping and cutting her clothes from her, giggling like hyenas; she is exposed and terrified and still aware enough to understand this ends badly for her.
“And this is Ephram Jibrani, of 675 Islington Street. Lovely mother. No father I see, not surprising with you wog sprats. Oh, and public housing which means our tax dollars pay your rent. Tell you what Ephram, you last the night and I promise we won’t get your mother down here to watch day two, okay?” Tyler is a sadist, and Ephram is struggling so hard his wrists are bleeding from the cuffs.
I close my eyes, but can’t close my ears. Violence comes on many levels, there is no such thing as clean violence. I know this for a fact; having employed it and had it employed against me. But even when I could I never used it as a shortcut; a problem that needed killing was always approved by higher agency and usually carried through by me as a result of my Blood Bond. But I never did anything like this; I have used Dominate to make people believe that things like this happened to them. A false equivalency, I know.
But this is monstrous. They are going to torture and rape these two unless we choose to take the punishment - Something Katherine and I could probably do without a great deal of lingering trauma; after all we can Dominate the rough edges off. But every time we do they will ratchet up the sadosexual torture until we are broken. The whole exercise is an insidious resource drain.
“Oh, one final rule. Anything you two” - Indicating Katherine and myself- “do to my men I will visit on these two three fold and THEN to you. So, watch the fangs you two.”
I look Katherine in the eye. Auspex is her specialty and I know she can read my thoughts. My plan is a horror but I look her in the eye until she gets the point. She sheds a tear as do I. We both know that this will not be easy.
We have to hold out. Hold while listening to screams, pleas, and begging. Inscribed into my mind with molten lead - Tyler never lets them shutdown. He has a little Dominate himself and he never lets them retreat. Tiffany and Ephram are conscious and aware through those four hours. He shows me things you can do with Dominate that should never be done to another thinking creature.
I learned to hate each of Tyler’s followers, every little giggle, laugh, dehumanizing remark. They would lay hands on me, turn my head to force me to watch them giddily grunting, sweating, polluting their victims.
Tyler stripped me of my power. Stripped Katherine of hers. Four hours in and our humanity was struggling. Oh, my hatred though.
I held on to that.
After four hours they start with the knives. Four hours of horror and violence and now they bring out the knives. I scream, “Stop! No more, for the love of god!” Katherine, bless her heart, is also on cue. “Please, I can’t watch…”
Tyler crows in triumph and starts ranting about how he knows that we will break to his will. His female follower is straddling Tiffany, holding a long handled switchblade. Another one, the chubby middle aged black fellow has a bowie knife and is about an inch into carving a design into Ephram’s back. I don’t know their names, just the feral grins.
I entrance the fat fellow. His grin goes vacuous and he becomes totally focused on me.
I look the female in the eye; she doesn’t look away because she thinks she has the power. “Please, just stab them, have mercy and kill them, end their pain…”
The fat bloke takes a moment to process that A) Tyler likes to watch things get stabbed, so no conflict with the blood bond and B) his New Friend wants something that Tyler can live with. So he drives the knife into the boy’s kidneys.
The female follower is quicker off the mark and much weaker willed. She’s stabbed poor Tiffany three times before Tyler turns around.
She keeps stabbing even when the others pile on, mechanically, arm up and down.
I catch Tiffany’s eyes; they have been staring at me, pleading for hours, once she understood I could make it stop. Hours I soaked in what was being done to her and Ephram when I could have taken it on at any time; the hurt and betrayal and the need to know why I wouldn’t help her - Every time she screamed that at me I…
I like to think that I will get even with Tyler. But I can’t, it is impossible. Instead I can only thwart his will and end these two innocent lives and bring them out of horror through death.
Tiffany knows I did something, as her blood fills her throat and her lungs collapse. She mouths ‘Thank you’ seizes and then goes still. Katherine is limp against her chains. I relax as well, taking some slight joy in the screaming of Tyler as he takes the switchblade away from the girl. The other two males in his crew follow the bosses lead and start savagely beating their compatriots.
The shouting and panic of these fucks is a vast improvement on the last two hours.
A good couple of minutes pass before Tyler gets control of things. He now has two dead bodies instead of hostages. Bodies that are there because I… I can’t focus on that now; but I will add them to the fucking nightmare that this job has become.
Two of his followers have been beaten unconscious. The other two have the knives now. Tyler looks at me and gives a primal scream, sends his two remaining ghouls to Katherine.
“I know what you did!” Tyler shrieks; flecks of blood from where his fangs cut his lips spray my face. “And what did I do, Tyler?” I reply calmly.
He whirls around and points at Katherine. “Fuck this bitch and stab her and then fuck the holes you fucking worthless cocks!” He whirls back to me. “You Dominated them, you made them kill those two!”
“I might have. I was getting bored, decided to move the calendar up,” I look over his shoulder, bored as hell. Inside I want to scream, as the two make Katherine grunt as they put the Bowie in her gut. Their confusion and fear has left them unable to perform but that will last only so long once Tyler gets his mojo back.
Katherine’s eyes are glinting. I hear in my head My Turn. She starts to plead and beg, she screams, she makes all the right sounds.
My Katherine. I had forgotten for a moment that she was at the Camps in Eastern Europe in Poland and Ukraine. These sons of bitches were amateurs to her and she could do things to them that she couldn’t to the Germans and their local allies.
After all, she has no higher ups holding her back.
I focus on Tyler. “You think you are in control? Of what? Your pissant followers?”
Tyler’s response is a growl and he punches my gut. I gasp and fall against the chains. Seeing me hit and Katherine stabbed has re-invogorated the remaining two ghouls. They approach Katherine and start doing to her what they did to Ephram and Tiffany.
For all of two seconds. First they each get very pale, then they both scream and start steaming, every blood vessel red and angry across their skin.
Tyler whirls around and goes for the knife at Katherine’s feet.
“Tch, Tyler. Seems like you can do anything right. Or yourself. I guess that’s why you needed the dick brigade there, to let you avoid your sense of self impotence.”
The pun gets him. He whirls, lost in frenzy, his tongue slashes out like a razor whip- To be met by my fangs. He struggles to pull away, trapped, but I bite through his tongue and jerk my head to rip it free, savage and bestial.
He gives a gobbling cry and falls back at Katherines feet. She looks at him for a moment, no pity, no nothing, like a scientist who studies pests looks at a cockroach in their kitchen. Then she touches Tyler with her foot and steam pours out of his body while he screams.
I can hear his veins and arteries burst, steam pouring out his mouth, his eyes rupture and his cranium swells and cracks. Seconds later he is dead, his body rapidly mummifying.
Katherine and I look at each other in the suddenly deafening silence.
We hear the door opening above us and Banafrit comes down the stairs slowly, her muscle following.
Katherine and I are still chained, upright, naked, covered in vitae, the halogen lights filling the room with light. In the corner Tyler’s two ghouls moan insensate, on the floor are two bodies, a young woman and young man clearly violated and abused.
She see Tyler’s remains, steaming, with two of the ghouls twisted in agony at Katherine’s feet. I spit the remains of Tyler’s tongue at her feet. “Hey toots. You missed a party.”
Katherine’s laughter is on the hysterical side and settles into a sob.
Banafrit’s men are clearly awed, and none too subtle regarding their pleasure at the freaks getting killed. “Ah, you might just want to shoot the two in the corner; when they wake up their God will be dead and ghouls tend not to cope well with that,” I toss out as a suggestion. Banafrit nods and two of her muscle lumber over and quickly crack some necks.
One of the men flips Ephram over, and stares with shock, before letting out a wail and beating his chest. He falls to his knees and pulls Ephram’s limp body to him, wailing Ephram’s name and chanting something in Arabic.
Banafrit is taken aback and then angry at the disruption with her men. “What is this about, now?!”
One of her bodyguards, tears streaming down his cheeks, turns to her. “It is Lila’s boy, Ephram. That is Fadil’s sister’s boy.”
Banafrit’s brows wrinkle. “But why would Tyler…”
I jump in with “Tyler knew. His little followers had a grudge against your men, they took it out this way. Ephram would have just disappeared, you’d replace your man after he started a fight and Tyler killed him… New guy would be not as good or a local boy outside your normal recruiting pool. Little things lead to big things.”
“Mistress, Fadil was offered things by Tyler’s whore. He said he was loyal to his wife and the witch took it poorly,” offers the bodyguard.
To give Banafrit credit, she wanted all this to just go away. But she needed to keep the loyalty of her men; so she responded with a stream of cursing in Arabic and kicked Tyler’s corpse.
She turns and touches Fadil on the shoulder. She tells him something in Arabic and Fadil calms down some.
“I am sorry Fadil, I had not known they were striking at you in this way, I might have played Tyler’s game differently,” I toss into the room.
Through gritted teeth Banafrit manages to ask, “What game?” She’s mad because Tyler was a mad dog of her making; her men knew it, I knew it. But she got careless and Tyler had been setting her up.
“Tyler told us that we could stop what was happening to the boy and the girl any time, we just had to offer him intel and take whatever he was doing to the mortals onto ourselves, I regret that I was not able to save the boy.”
Fadil stares at me, a look of confused anger on his face. “You let them do this? You let them?”
“No; Ephram was dead when he was brought in here. Tyler was going to torture and rape him no matter what I did; every time I intervened made it Tyler stronger. I’m sorry Fadil. All I could do was wait until they started playing with knives.”
My voice shakes a bit, not entirely feigned. But I bring the steel back in. “But once I had the chance I ended his pain. And hers. And,” looking Banafrit in the eye, “Katherine and I set about wiping that cunt from the face of the earth. In fact, I believe I told Tyler very specifically that this incident was going in my journal under that title. Didn’t I, Katherine?”
“You know, I do believe you did, Francis. I clearly recall ‘Ginger muschi’ being mentioned.”
“Oh. And we did this all while chained the fuck up. So. Kindly, arrange to put us back in comfortable chairs, remove these bodies, and get something to clean the blood up. Because your fucking mad dog really took the class out of this joint.”
And that, Banafrit, is a lesson in how your strip power from someone; by inches and degrees.
Her men looked at me with respect; at Katherine with fear. I was the man who, unable to stop a shameful thing, ended it at first opportunity. She was the witch who killed with a touch.
I wondered how long it take her to figure out why we were still here.
They gave us our chairs, removed the bodies, and brought down some comet and bleach to clean the floors. I tossed a couple of other suggestions to them which they grudgingly accepted. I was an enemy, yes, but one with a sense of honor.
Our third day…
Katherine and I were quiet that evening. The bravado from yesterday had fled, the role was drained out of us. We were exhausted and the lack of blood was taking a toll on me. Katherine had topped off with Tyler’s boys last night but even so had been forced to spend Vitae to fuel her magics.
“How do you think today is going to, Francis?”
I ponder it for a moment. “Right now Banafrit has been working her channels; the info she got from me is hardly complete and the kind of people she is working for won’t take kindly to a half finished job. She still needs you to leverage me; that hasn’t changed. But I’m pretty sure your boss has a condition monitor on you somehow; the Tremere back in Seattle seemed to do them easily enough. So he is going to be breathing down her neck to kill you…”
I pause and force myself down the dark roads.
“They will start with your ear, a toe, a finger. Then an eye. Then your feet, then hands. Banafrit isn’t an idiot so she won’t try to erase your image as a woman. But she will go for your tongue, to attack your image as a mage.”
Katherine nods; her reasoning went hand in hand with mine.
“But she won’t do anything like that till your boss shows up so he can counter any magic you toss with his own. So; tell me about your boss?”
“Albert Kinsey? Been dead since the 1880’s, is a crony of DiZagreb, rode that horse into the ground. He runs the, uh…” she trails off.
“Right, he’s local management.”
“Sure, I think you can say that. Or at least I can. He opposed the Bowsley plan in public; the only reason I didn’t take his job is that he is twice the brown nose that I am.”
“Decent mage?”
She snorts. “Utter shit, compared to me. But good enough for the job. Real manager type.”
“Right, so equal parts insecure and lacking ambition to competence. I bet Kinsey's boss is worried that if you get promoted that you will be gunning for more promotions.”
“Probably.”
“Good, I think I can…”
The door upstairs opens.
Banafrit comes down with her goons. Halima is trailing her, looking uncertain. “We are ending this today, Francis. Tell me who and what your network is, identify your allies, and give us details of your actions to date.”
“Erm… No.”
It was my slight pause that really aggravated her.
A forked tongue slips out of Banafrit’s mouth. “No?!”
“Not unless you give me something in return.”
She is taken aback. “I can kill you where you sit…”
“Then you risk nothing. And get everything. Kill me, and you risk everything.”
She stops, and just stares. “If I make you love me…”
“I will tell you everything then, too. You hope. But you’ve left me down here with a mage; I can tell you with absolute certainty that Tremere can fuck Presence into a pretzel.”
Banafrit glances at Katherine who just smiles and lifts her hand as far the chain will allow for a little wave.
“Tell you what Banafrit, I’ll go so far as to make you an offer. You let me and Katherine go, give us a car, and then we can help you get out of the country. If you don’t, well, you are on your own.”
She laughs, Banafrit, for about five seconds until she realizes I’m serious.
“I can’t do that…”
“Then, Q & A then.”
“Fine. But one lie…”
“And bad things happen.”
“First question: What is your plans for Ireland?”
“I don’t know, I won’t until I get inside her court.”
She is taken aback at this.
“My turn. Do you Followers of Set have a religious proscription to be Bond Villains? Serious question, it’s like you come from central casting for ‘bad guys-r-us’.”
Banafrit blinks. Clearly she was expecting something like ‘who hired you’.
“No. But when our God rises darkness will wash over the earth and we will rule as gods. Undermining the social orders of others aids in His rising.”
“Ah, I see. It also helps disrupt the power base of others and in the chaos it makes it easier to recruit if you’re the only stable element around.”
She nods.
“Your turn then, m’lady.”
“Why are you doing this?”
“Vengeance for my Grandsire. He had interests here and she killed them. Ventrue are very family oriented. Also, she is a two faced bitch who has been waiting for her shot to leverage the Ventrue into a negotiating position since Mithras disappeared. She does the Anarchs no favors and will rejoin the Camarilla as soon as it makes an offer she likes. This will weaken the Anarchs in a disastrous fashion as so many Brujah will lose heart in the cause once they get their nose rubbed in the hypocrisy.”
“That is… Surprisingly complicated.”
“Never said it was simple. So, what got you into this line of work?”
Again, she is taken aback. I keep asking the wrong questions.
“Kidnapping and murder for hire? I’ve always been good at it. Halima can be anyone she needs to be for short period; I’m good at getting info. Tyler used to be stable but lately he was claiming to have found a shortcut to Set and godhead.”
“Yeah, got that vibe from him. But you really just told me your resume. Why this line of work when so many others are out there?”
“I, well, the Followers took me in as a child, trained me. I was good at luring away the Ottoman’s soldiers, then robbing them after I cut them. This is what I know.”
“Fair enough.”
“What got you into your line of work?” Banafrit gives me the little ‘two can play at that game smirk’.
“The Great Game. In my mortal days it was East vs. West, as a ghoul it was Ventrue vs Tremere, today it is the Jihad and the End of Nights. I play the Great Game and I feel alive, always pushing up hills and to build faster than others can tear down. I’ve sacrificed nearly everything to the Game. Women, money, fame, and recognition all dust beneath my feet as I go to the next task.”
Katherine and I share a look. Our first and so far last night together we’d talked about this between sharing blood. We both loved the game for it’s sake, but she had seen where it could lead in a dark way.
“My turn then. Who is the man with the Roman spatha?”
Banafrit starts shaking.
“I cannot say his name. But it is he who hired me; who shall be your doom.”
“Not if I get him first,” I follow that up with a wink. She is still shaking.
“Banafrit, your guest has arrived!” Halima shouts down the hallway.
A thin bald man with wire rim spectacle and a tweed suit comes down the hallway, and all eyes are on him. Which means they aren’t on me. Last night Katherine had managed to lift the cuff keys from the ghouls using her magics, and then pass them to me.
So we were about as secured as a tourist's credit card at a hacker convention.
Kinsey takes in the room wild a cold glare. “Can I speak to you upstairs, Madame?” Chill, cold, and little off center. His rival was still alive, naked, filthy, and spattered with the blood of dead ghouls; but clear eyed and unbroken.
Banafrit, clearly angry that she wasn’t able to stage the situation more, stalks up the stairs after Kinsey. “Watch them!” she snaps out at two of her body guards, taking the other two upstairs. One of them left downstairs was Fadil.
After they were gone, I look at Katherine. “You know when they come back down they are going to kill you.”
Wistful, Katherine surveys the room. “Probably. How do you propose to change that?”
I start to exert my charm on the room, “Hey, Fadil, did your nephew get properly taken care of?”
He nods, “Yes, my sister is sad, but the Mistress make good.”
“Fadil, I’m sorry I couldn’t help more. Could I pester you for one thing? I’ve been dying for a cigarette; they don’t do much for me, but the habit, it stays with you.”
Fadil nods, pulls out a ciggy and lights it up for me, then gently passes to my lips. I suck a deep drag and blow it out my nose; contented look on my face.
“Say,” I manage around the smoke, “could you get one for Katherine, too?”
The other gent nods and pulls out a smoke and lights it for Katherine. He turns back to me to give me a thumbs up and turns back to Katherine except she has stood up and has placed her hand over his mouth. Has a moment of surprise before his brain boils and he drops to the ground silently.
Fadil is trying to shout, but I’ve spent precious vitae and the world is moving like molasses uphill. I’m behind him and I’ve got myself wrapped around him and fangs in his neck. He goes limp with ecstasy, the conditioning of a ghoul telling him to stop fighting as I replenish my reserves, heal my minor wounds, and take even more. I’ve been told that the last blood in a body, the Heart’s Blood is the most intense; I’ve never drained someone to death before.
It is a rush.
The power flooding, my heart beat matches Fadil’s, hammering fast and crazy and scared and then easing into bliss and swimming in a pool of joy; then dimming and fading as he bleeds out and the final few furtive pumps of his heart like a sparrow falling from a tree.
Katherine is feeding up as well, a look of distaste passes her face. “God, I hate it when it’s cooked; it curdles.”
We drag the bodies under the stairs and inventory. We have a sawed off shotgun, a belly gun the old men on my street called it. One Makarov, a boot knife, some cigarettes, matches, and a zippo lighter.
I find the plastic bucket used to clean up yesterday’s mess and the cleaning supplies - Bleach, comet flakes, and half a bottle of anti-freeze. And drain cleaner, bless their hearts.
I dump the bucket. Katherine is stripping her victim, looking for other items of use; she just settles on his leather jacket to cover herself. I disable half the lights plunging the back end of the basement in shadows. We hear a creak from upstairs and I find an old tea mug. I pour the drain cleaner into it.
“Katherine, love, I need Kinsey to be blind. I can handle the others; okay?”
“Francis, dear, don’t teach me how to fuck with a Tremere, more or less the first thing we learn.”
“Okay. Next thing is this will feel a little creepy, but roll with it.”
“You’re always a little creepy, and if you haven’t noticed, I’ve been taking the punches well,” Katherine kisses me fiercely. “You certainly are a dangerous man to know, Francis Casterly.”
The door opens upstairs and I step back from Katherine and pull the shadows in close. I’d always hoped to ask the Captain more about how this worked; but fear of the Elder was always a little squirrely for me.
Banafrit is walking down first, Kinsey second, the other two ghouls are following. They immediately note the lights are out, Banafrit sees the chairs are empty and rushes down two more steps before she realizes that she is in a world of hurt. The can of Comet is hovering above them on the stairs; the last guards face is just appearing at the top of the stairs, and Katherine is using her magics to hold the can steady in a line between me and that bodyguard.
I let fly with both barrels of the shotgun, and drop it, scooping up the Makarov.
The Comet explodes in a white cloud and the rearmost bodyguard goes down in a tangle of intestines and mangled bone.
Banafrit is screaming in panic; she’s got caustic soap in her eyes and mouth, she’s trying to go up the stairs but is tangled up in Kinsey, who is trying to see what is happening next but can’t because of the film of of comet on his glasses; that last bodyguard is staring down into the floor and is trying to pull his pistol out but is caught up on his compatriot who fell on top of him.
Initiative; can’t have with that.
I raise the Makarov and put two into his face.
Katherine is moving the drain cleaner to Kinsey now.
I train the Makarov on Banafrit and proceed forward, shooting measured shots into her head.
Katherine dumps the bucket full of drain cleaner on Kinsey; he screams as it reacts with the comet to start boiling his flesh.
With a choking scream Banafrit goes down. Kinsey is thrashing until I put the last two rounds in the Makarov into his head.
Katherine and I pick our way up the stairs; I make a slight pause to pick up the body guard’s pistol. We hear the door slam upstairs and a car start in the drive, screeching away. “That’ll be Halima,” we continue through the house. I find Bana’s materials and the dead drop details plus notes in a journal that were in code.
A cursory glance tells me that Banafrit was part of the Liverpool op which explains how i got dragged into this.
I manage to find a cell phone and some cash; time to call a cab.
I gather up my findings in a knapsack and Katherine calls me to a room upstairs. It’s a shrine of some kind, clearly Egyptian motifs. Fresh incense is burning, and small cat mummies are dissected around the shrine. Katherine and I look at each other and back away.
When we finally leave I’ve got a pair of ill fitting pants on, she’s wearing a suit jacket and that is it for clothing. The house is burning cheerfully behind us and we are walking out free and clear from this skeleton of a neighborhood.
Katherine is leaning into me; she kisses my cheek. “You know Francis, you take a girl to the weir-” and her head falls off, her hair becoming a cloud as it tumbles forward; the face going slack and the eyes blink twice before her face, that face, Katherine’s face starts to shrivel and collapse into ash and dust.
Something kicks me in the back and there is a tug on my shoulder as the blade comes free, along with the back pack. I roll over on my back and back lit by the flames is a cloaked man, with a Roman spatha, fire and smoke casting a halo of madness around him. He wipes his blade on his cloak and sheathes it, I note he holds his sword in his left hand which is a two fingered blue claw.
He looks at me, stares at me, measures me. And I get thrown back into the pond; he only killed Katherine because her neck was between his blade and the shoulder strap on the backpack. He turns, and walks to the fire, tossing the back pack into the flames, before stalking back. I see some fangs, possibly tusks, before his eyes glow red and whispers to me: “Flee.”
And I do. I flee. And because I am a Ventrue I can do it for hours without getting tired.
Oh God! Katherine!
The girls find me disheveled and weeping in the living room just before dawn, covered in ashes, blood, and self pity. They help me downstairs were the sun forces my waking nightmare to end.
26th May, 2014
Seattle, WA
He'd told the story glibly, as an anecdote. It wasn't enough to remove the stains, the scars. He couldn't... Katherine's face floating in a cloud; confused and slackening.
Because he'd sacrificed everything - And it was worth the cost.
Seattle, WA
He Dreams. He Remembers.
1st of August, 2013
Limerick, Ireland
It’s 5am and Katherine and I are tangled in the silk sheets of her hotel bedroom. She stopped by to deliver some of the items necessary for my scheme; thaumaturgical vessels that preserve blood perfectly for months on end and a special device that restores it to the conditions as if it had just left the body. It even keeps the narcotics and other goodies from breaking down.
“Katherine, I had to admit I’m getting passing fond of you…” I murmur as I nip at her neck. She sighs and arches into me, increasing our skin contact. “Same back at you Francis.”
We are as far from a Gothic vampire romance as we can get; neither of us are pretty, skinny, or in my case pale beauty frozen for all time in a mask of moon-lit flesh. She is a slightly overweight Jewish woman, overly tall, skinny arms and wide hips. I’m solidly rotund, to say the least, and very forgettably British in my look and demeanor.
We fell into this because in our ways we are very similar. We both are driven, ambitious, and utterly convinced the game is explicitly rigged against us. Makes winning all that more important.
“Did you put out the do not disturb sign? Don’t need housekeeping interrupting our rest…” she asks me, licking a little of the drying vitae from my chest.
“Of course I did.” We can both feel the weight of the sun rising; pushing consciousness down and down until we hit that oblivion point. Her body goes still and soft while mine stays slightly warm with a slow heartbeat.
In the middle of the day I wake up screaming, covered in a blood sweat - The smell of meat burning strong on my tongue; Von Graff’s head sliding from his body with a wet thump. His killer is always a different person but they all used a Roman sword to make the kill. I know he said a name before he died, if only I could remember it.
I must remember!
My nightmare at this point usually revolves around my loss of memory, adjustment of perception, until black is white and none of my allies are recognizable as anything but tools on the board. My little visit with my daughters seems to have knocked a few cobwebs in my brain loose.
Katherine stirs beside me, sleepily she inhales and mumbles “Frzz, al’right?”
I mutter re-assurances and we fall back to sleep; that evening we take a shower to clean the blood off me; she does a ritual to remove our traces from the room and I bag all the sheets and pillows for later incineration. We brought our own just for this purpose; no one can say we aren’t careful little vampires.
“Meet me at the usual time and place, later this week?” she asks as we drag our luggage through the lobby of the hotel.
“Of course, my dear. Wouldn’t miss it for the world. Shall I make it a real stinker?” I give her a little smile; our pass fail is terrible puns. One, non-native speakers struggle with them. Two the joke is referential to our last assignation; it is always one we’ve heard from the other person and we have to match the punchlines. Again, hard to crack even by getting into our heads because which joke am I going to use and/or can they program the response correctly?
Even better we have a whole code based on a bad joke. Anything that starts with ‘Why did the…” is a duress indicator.
Katherine pecks my check before getting into the cab and whispers, “Of course” in my ear. A short but fierce hug later and she is gone.
I go back to my safehouse and continue to educate the girls. Tonight we will be playing ‘spot the liar’.
***
3rd of August, 2013
I’m meeting Katherine at our favorite cafe. We like this one because in the evening they serve wonderful craft beers and little hand pies; they smell divine when taken together and the girls would likely enjoy me taking some home. Despite my protestations they tend to call me Grandfather in private and ‘Daddy’ in public. A week in and they are already driving me batty.
But I still smile when I think about how good Rabbit has gotten at lifting a wallet or that Jory is a gifted sifter of lies. Hannah has improved her blade work immensely; their parents cannot complain that I’ve stinted on their educations. They all hate ‘science time’. History hour is also not their happy place.
I’m still smiling when I take my seat at the cafe; I order for Katherine and myself. The waitress is a local lass who has all the boys circling with stutters and stammers I’m sure. After ten minutes Katherine arrives.
I stand and pull her chair out, a piece of social etiquette from our youth that we both find charmingly anachronistic. She takes her seat with a murmur of thanks and both lean in to appear to be a couple on their third date. In actuality it is more like our ninth, but we both have been nervous to confront what is happening between us.
We make small talk until the waitress lays our ales on the table which is our cue to give the passkeys that announce all is safe with us.
“Katherine, I heard the most awful joke the other day.”
Her eyes sparkle, brown and surprisingly warm. “Oh, how awful?”
“How many prostitutes does it take to screw in a lightbulb?”
She gives the answer right away, “Just one? But she charges extra for the kinky stuff.”
I mock good hearted chagrin. “Okay, you’ve heard that one. Do you have one in return?”
Katherine smiles and in a very flirting tone, just like the one where she asked me to inspect her hotel room for ‘hidden devices’ last week, she says, “What do you call a chicken crossing the road?”
The patrons are shocked when I vault the little chain cordoning off the outdoor area of the restaurant. A simple glance back shows me Katherine, looking shocked then enraged; like she’d been tricked.
The answer to the joke is ‘Poultry in motion’. We chuckled over that one; then built a response trigger of ‘flee’ into it. Who ever they were, they had Katherine and had managed to get to her level 2 info; which meant some serious work being done on her.
Protocol was to evade, entirely, avoid vehicles and stick to mass transit. But I wanted to save her…
I ran, dodging and diving and ducking. A guy my size should not be so light on his feet; being a vampire has it’s benefits. Being a Ventrue more so - I can do this for a week.
Thirty minutes later and I’m roughly 3 miles away; where I’m not sure. The conditioning is flee; how long is a little fuzzy. I’m standing in front of a house in the middle of a development; Ireland had a housing boom at the same time as the states as influx of cheap borrowing flooded the market with home buyers. Like the States there weren’t enough houses for everyone to be happy and the idea of owning land is even stronger in Ireland than in the U.S. In fact the U.S. has a milder form of the ‘ownership’ need; in Ireland it is nearly fetishistic.
Of course after the collapse this left ‘zombie developments’ - Entire housing projects with a few houses finished and the rest either lots and half built and left to rot. The collapsing banks were stuck holding the bag on collateralized properties with little intrinsic value and no one with enough credit left to do even minor developments on the lots.
So they rotted on the vine; somehow my little run lead me here.
Should be a good place to hide while I think about my next step (why am I hiding in a remote and hard to access place with no people around) and plan out how I’m going to rescue Katherine.
I go inside the house and walk past the granite countertops and the shredded walls were some Travelers or hoodies ripped out the plumbing. Basement, best place to hide. I go down the basement and thankfully the lights work (Why would they, this place is abandoned) and I go downstairs.
There in the floor of the basement is Katherine sitting on a steel frame chair, her hands are cuffed to the armrests and her feet are tied to a metal staple set in the concrecrete. A swarthy man in a leather jacket has a sawed double barreled shotgun pressed to the side of her neck. She’s naked, and I can smell burned meat and see weals and charred flesh; heated wire coat hangers most likely.
Tracks of dried blood are flaking on her cheeks.
I walk down the last few stairs and turn the corner and I see the waitress from the bar; I blink and it is a woman with dusky-pale skin with that North African look to her. As soon as I see her I blink and the Summons leaves me - I whirl and I hear the click of hammers coming back; other men with that East Mediterranean look, large men with shotguns and machetes. The click was the hammers on the shotgun pressed to Katherine’s neck being pulled back.
“I am Banafrit; strip and sit in your chair.” She points to a chair around the back side the stairs facing Katherine.
I gauge my odds, four ghouls and probably two Kindred; one with clearly high end Presence capacity and some moderate Obfuscate.
I kick off my shoes, then remove my jacket, my shirt, my knives, two pistols, a couple of other odds and ends. Then the trousers, underwear and socks; I’m pointed to sit in the chair. Quickly my ankles are leg cuffed, chained to the staple. My arms are secured to the armrests and I’m left to stare at Katherine.
“Sorry about this Kath-” A shotgun butt knocks my head, “Silence!” hisses my personal shotgunner. I say nothing but I track my eyes to his; he knows enough to look away. But he catches the edge of my gaze and flinches.
Twenty minutes later Katherine or her double comes down the stairs, she is swearing in some Middle Eastern dialect. “He knew, somehow! I lost him… Wait, how did he get here?” She is truly surprised to see me.
“I caught him,” Banafrit says from the corner. She has been preparing something this whole time and her boys drag a table over. Ah, the Presentation of the Instruments. Someone read a field manual or three.
“Halima, I’ve been netting fools like him for decades. He had a code with Katherine; what she gave up was the burn codes. But I arranged to meet him briefly before the meet and came here. Ten minutes into his run and I ‘asked’ him to come visit,” Banafrit is the dominant partner.
Halima releaxes and she goes from a perfect copy of Katherine to a very likely one in poor lighting. Fleshcrafting and Obfuscate? Unsure.
“It doesn’t matter how you got him Banafrit, what are we going to do with them both?” Halima is also young, impatient, and a little too focused on Banafrit. Sire/Childe relationship? No, partners but senior/junior.
“I’ll torture them, as contracted, then kill them as our employers specified.” Banafrit is all business but she gets a little excited; her eyes flutter a little. Halima is a little disconcerted; she likes the game and the chase but is squeamish about the results.
“Fine. I’ll be upstairs. You have the internet up?”
Banafrit sighs, ever so slightly. “Yes.” Halima somewhat gratefully runs upstairs.
“She’s not used to the work yet?” I ask in a conversational way. My keeper moves to club me again when Banafrit raises her hand.
“And what would you know of the ‘work’ little Ventrue?”
I chuckle. “All sorts, really. Like I know that I will not lie to you and will answer any questions you ask. I know that torture works. I know that my best hope is to feed as much information to you as possible but only things things you ask about. My volunteering things is a hint that we’ve gone into fantasy land.”
She nods slowly. “And you know I’m going to do it anyway. The torture.”
“Of course. But I have to ask, why two employers?”
She flinches, just a little. I press on, “Clearly you were hired by Katherine’s immediate superior to make herself and me disappear; easy enough. But you are torturing us. The longer you put off that final death the more chances we have to ruin your evening. Torture implies informational need; which implies gaps in knowledge. Katherine’s management does not need that information; they pull it from her mind. They want us disappeared, likely for tales I’ve been telling and some of the research Katherine has been doing.”
Banafrit is now openly a little shocked.
“How are you…”
“Logic. Holmesian logic. I’m a different case. You kept Katherine to leverage me. I’m a bonus two-for-one process; another party hired you to learn my plans. That party is confused because I’m doing all the right things in the wrong way; too damned fast. I’m running through a game at some kind at a blur, disrupting their slow methodical plans. They know it, and I know it. And I pegged their interest when I skewed a long con in Liverpool.”
She pauses. “You knew I was coming, didn’t you?”
I shrug. “Someone like you.”
She shakes her head. “Normally I’d present the instruments, but I guess we can skip that.”
So she did. I’ll skip the precise details; only to say that she was gifted. Torture is often done by specialists for a reason. Too much and the subject dies, too little and the subject is empowered to resist. It is a psychology of its own. To be a Kindred or a Ghoul older than a decade or three is to know torture at some point.
That evening she tested my resolve against fire, having my flesh marred, scarred, and losing an eye. She learned that I would parcel out secrets to prevent Katherine from getting worked over and would hold everything back when they worked on me; Banafrit bought into my little barter economy rather quickly.
The same time I was learning about her and Halima. There was a third vamp in the basement.
He stayed back until the next night.
Katherine and I were left alone for a few moments before dawn. We struggled to stay awake and they made no bother to gag us. I suspect because were being recorded. “Katherine?”
“Yes, Francis?”
“Were you crying for me?”
This gets a choked laugh from her. “A little pretentious, I get tortured and cry a little and you think it’s about you?”
I laugh a little too.
“Yes, Francis. I shed a tear or two for you. Not very pragmatic of me; but I do rather enjoy your company.”
“I think you’re cool too, Katherine.”
She giggles at that. “Too long in America, I’m afraid, Francis…” she trails off as the sun pulls us down.
I wake up on our second night. I quickly go over what I’ve learned and what they have learned. They know I’m on a mission.. They know I’ve been playing different identities. They don’t know about the girls. They might soon though, as the girls will come looking and they are not ready for this kind of crowd; they would hesitate too much in killing what needed to be killed.
What they don’t know are my resources and personnel; they expect my timeline to be years or a decade, which is a rush job to them. Hah.
Tonight is going to be rougher; they will try to break us down hard. The initial test and observation period is over; now the third man man is going to step out. Let’s see what his tools are.
Shortly after Katherine wakes we are swarmed over by a different set of ghouls; three men and one woman. They are hauling a pretty blonde with them; the waitress from the pub. Katherine and I recognize her immediately, Katherine closes her eyes because we both have a sense of the waste that is about to happen.
They cuff the waitress to another staple on the floor then leave. Twenty minutes later they bring down a young lad; Middle Eastern or North African. They staple the boy to the floor as well; him I do not know.
The ghouls are a seedy and rattish lot, the girl with them has a lot of piercings and screams ‘I was abused by mom’s boyfriend’ - She’s carrying a lot of rage and has been told that she can do what she wants to people when the leash is let off. She’s the easiest to read but the three men, of varying ethnic backgrounds and size all have a similar feel to them. Their master comes down and they all smile, jittery with excitement.
Their master is a pimp; I could not say if he was or not but he had the soul of a slaver and a pimp. You could see it; he owned people. They weren’t things, they were people still, but he owned them and he really liked to see what he could get them to do so as to demonstrate his ownership over them.
He was also a ginger. I try hard not to hold that against him; know plenty of perfectly fine gingers. But this one is grade A pimp asshole.
“We are going to play a game,” he starts, a forked tongue slipping between his lips. His followers giggle. His voice is smooth, surprisingly deep, and very South England.
“Stop.” I hold his eyes. The tongue means he could paralyze me, but he won’t.
“Sorry?”
“Seriously. Setites. Why are you all hell bent on being evil fuckers? At the embrace do you all get a copy of the Evil Overlord’s Guide to Success?”
He smiles and walks over, casually.
His tongue flicks out and I feel a burn on my cheek, running down to my neck, then the sliding rasp of the tongue as it gathers the vitae oozing from the wound.
“We are going to play a game, which means rules. Rules are simple, we are going to hurt the pretty lady and the boy. When you want it to stop happening to them you tell us a secret and then we do it to you for a while. Then we do something new to the boy and the girl, until you tell us a secret… And so on. The winner is whichever the two of you takes the most punishment to keep your partner alive the longest.” I can feel his tongue in my ear.
“Winner gets to eat, loser gets to starve. Simple enough.”
“Can I get your name sir?” I manage to get out past my revulsion. Bastard saw our empathy yesterday; wants us to volunteer info to compare to yesterdays intel.
“Why? So you know what to scream later?”
“No, so I can write in my journal ‘Dear diary, today I killed a ginger cunt named…”
He laughs. “Call me Tyler, meat.” Tyler whistles, his boys throw a cloth bag over the heads of the waitress and the boy, and the muscle from yesterday comes down to change our restraint arrangements from the chair to upright spread eagle. Weird, why doesn't he want Banafrit's people knowing who the captives are? I can tell the muscle hates this guy and his crew. They are pros and he is the ‘mad dog’ used to threaten people after exposure. ‘Oh, you don’t want to talk to me? Let me get Tyler’ is the line I sense coming.
Katherine knows it too. We are naked, helpless, and at the mercy of these second rate Bond villains. They will force their will and mark their power on us.
Tyler gives the nod and his people swarm over the waitress and the boy. Tyler reads their I.D.s out, “Tiffany Laughlin, 326 Kilkenny Lane. Oh look, Tiffany is the oldest child. Perhaps when we are done here we can visit her little brother and sister.” Tiffany, our waitress, cries and screams a little louder. The ghouls are ripping and cutting her clothes from her, giggling like hyenas; she is exposed and terrified and still aware enough to understand this ends badly for her.
“And this is Ephram Jibrani, of 675 Islington Street. Lovely mother. No father I see, not surprising with you wog sprats. Oh, and public housing which means our tax dollars pay your rent. Tell you what Ephram, you last the night and I promise we won’t get your mother down here to watch day two, okay?” Tyler is a sadist, and Ephram is struggling so hard his wrists are bleeding from the cuffs.
I close my eyes, but can’t close my ears. Violence comes on many levels, there is no such thing as clean violence. I know this for a fact; having employed it and had it employed against me. But even when I could I never used it as a shortcut; a problem that needed killing was always approved by higher agency and usually carried through by me as a result of my Blood Bond. But I never did anything like this; I have used Dominate to make people believe that things like this happened to them. A false equivalency, I know.
But this is monstrous. They are going to torture and rape these two unless we choose to take the punishment - Something Katherine and I could probably do without a great deal of lingering trauma; after all we can Dominate the rough edges off. But every time we do they will ratchet up the sadosexual torture until we are broken. The whole exercise is an insidious resource drain.
“Oh, one final rule. Anything you two” - Indicating Katherine and myself- “do to my men I will visit on these two three fold and THEN to you. So, watch the fangs you two.”
I look Katherine in the eye. Auspex is her specialty and I know she can read my thoughts. My plan is a horror but I look her in the eye until she gets the point. She sheds a tear as do I. We both know that this will not be easy.
We have to hold out. Hold while listening to screams, pleas, and begging. Inscribed into my mind with molten lead - Tyler never lets them shutdown. He has a little Dominate himself and he never lets them retreat. Tiffany and Ephram are conscious and aware through those four hours. He shows me things you can do with Dominate that should never be done to another thinking creature.
I learned to hate each of Tyler’s followers, every little giggle, laugh, dehumanizing remark. They would lay hands on me, turn my head to force me to watch them giddily grunting, sweating, polluting their victims.
Tyler stripped me of my power. Stripped Katherine of hers. Four hours in and our humanity was struggling. Oh, my hatred though.
I held on to that.
After four hours they start with the knives. Four hours of horror and violence and now they bring out the knives. I scream, “Stop! No more, for the love of god!” Katherine, bless her heart, is also on cue. “Please, I can’t watch…”
Tyler crows in triumph and starts ranting about how he knows that we will break to his will. His female follower is straddling Tiffany, holding a long handled switchblade. Another one, the chubby middle aged black fellow has a bowie knife and is about an inch into carving a design into Ephram’s back. I don’t know their names, just the feral grins.
I entrance the fat fellow. His grin goes vacuous and he becomes totally focused on me.
I look the female in the eye; she doesn’t look away because she thinks she has the power. “Please, just stab them, have mercy and kill them, end their pain…”
The fat bloke takes a moment to process that A) Tyler likes to watch things get stabbed, so no conflict with the blood bond and B) his New Friend wants something that Tyler can live with. So he drives the knife into the boy’s kidneys.
The female follower is quicker off the mark and much weaker willed. She’s stabbed poor Tiffany three times before Tyler turns around.
She keeps stabbing even when the others pile on, mechanically, arm up and down.
I catch Tiffany’s eyes; they have been staring at me, pleading for hours, once she understood I could make it stop. Hours I soaked in what was being done to her and Ephram when I could have taken it on at any time; the hurt and betrayal and the need to know why I wouldn’t help her - Every time she screamed that at me I…
I like to think that I will get even with Tyler. But I can’t, it is impossible. Instead I can only thwart his will and end these two innocent lives and bring them out of horror through death.
Tiffany knows I did something, as her blood fills her throat and her lungs collapse. She mouths ‘Thank you’ seizes and then goes still. Katherine is limp against her chains. I relax as well, taking some slight joy in the screaming of Tyler as he takes the switchblade away from the girl. The other two males in his crew follow the bosses lead and start savagely beating their compatriots.
The shouting and panic of these fucks is a vast improvement on the last two hours.
A good couple of minutes pass before Tyler gets control of things. He now has two dead bodies instead of hostages. Bodies that are there because I… I can’t focus on that now; but I will add them to the fucking nightmare that this job has become.
Two of his followers have been beaten unconscious. The other two have the knives now. Tyler looks at me and gives a primal scream, sends his two remaining ghouls to Katherine.
“I know what you did!” Tyler shrieks; flecks of blood from where his fangs cut his lips spray my face. “And what did I do, Tyler?” I reply calmly.
He whirls around and points at Katherine. “Fuck this bitch and stab her and then fuck the holes you fucking worthless cocks!” He whirls back to me. “You Dominated them, you made them kill those two!”
“I might have. I was getting bored, decided to move the calendar up,” I look over his shoulder, bored as hell. Inside I want to scream, as the two make Katherine grunt as they put the Bowie in her gut. Their confusion and fear has left them unable to perform but that will last only so long once Tyler gets his mojo back.
Katherine’s eyes are glinting. I hear in my head My Turn. She starts to plead and beg, she screams, she makes all the right sounds.
My Katherine. I had forgotten for a moment that she was at the Camps in Eastern Europe in Poland and Ukraine. These sons of bitches were amateurs to her and she could do things to them that she couldn’t to the Germans and their local allies.
After all, she has no higher ups holding her back.
I focus on Tyler. “You think you are in control? Of what? Your pissant followers?”
Tyler’s response is a growl and he punches my gut. I gasp and fall against the chains. Seeing me hit and Katherine stabbed has re-invogorated the remaining two ghouls. They approach Katherine and start doing to her what they did to Ephram and Tiffany.
For all of two seconds. First they each get very pale, then they both scream and start steaming, every blood vessel red and angry across their skin.
Tyler whirls around and goes for the knife at Katherine’s feet.
“Tch, Tyler. Seems like you can do anything right. Or yourself. I guess that’s why you needed the dick brigade there, to let you avoid your sense of self impotence.”
The pun gets him. He whirls, lost in frenzy, his tongue slashes out like a razor whip- To be met by my fangs. He struggles to pull away, trapped, but I bite through his tongue and jerk my head to rip it free, savage and bestial.
He gives a gobbling cry and falls back at Katherines feet. She looks at him for a moment, no pity, no nothing, like a scientist who studies pests looks at a cockroach in their kitchen. Then she touches Tyler with her foot and steam pours out of his body while he screams.
I can hear his veins and arteries burst, steam pouring out his mouth, his eyes rupture and his cranium swells and cracks. Seconds later he is dead, his body rapidly mummifying.
Katherine and I look at each other in the suddenly deafening silence.
We hear the door opening above us and Banafrit comes down the stairs slowly, her muscle following.
Katherine and I are still chained, upright, naked, covered in vitae, the halogen lights filling the room with light. In the corner Tyler’s two ghouls moan insensate, on the floor are two bodies, a young woman and young man clearly violated and abused.
She see Tyler’s remains, steaming, with two of the ghouls twisted in agony at Katherine’s feet. I spit the remains of Tyler’s tongue at her feet. “Hey toots. You missed a party.”
Katherine’s laughter is on the hysterical side and settles into a sob.
Banafrit’s men are clearly awed, and none too subtle regarding their pleasure at the freaks getting killed. “Ah, you might just want to shoot the two in the corner; when they wake up their God will be dead and ghouls tend not to cope well with that,” I toss out as a suggestion. Banafrit nods and two of her muscle lumber over and quickly crack some necks.
One of the men flips Ephram over, and stares with shock, before letting out a wail and beating his chest. He falls to his knees and pulls Ephram’s limp body to him, wailing Ephram’s name and chanting something in Arabic.
Banafrit is taken aback and then angry at the disruption with her men. “What is this about, now?!”
One of her bodyguards, tears streaming down his cheeks, turns to her. “It is Lila’s boy, Ephram. That is Fadil’s sister’s boy.”
Banafrit’s brows wrinkle. “But why would Tyler…”
I jump in with “Tyler knew. His little followers had a grudge against your men, they took it out this way. Ephram would have just disappeared, you’d replace your man after he started a fight and Tyler killed him… New guy would be not as good or a local boy outside your normal recruiting pool. Little things lead to big things.”
“Mistress, Fadil was offered things by Tyler’s whore. He said he was loyal to his wife and the witch took it poorly,” offers the bodyguard.
To give Banafrit credit, she wanted all this to just go away. But she needed to keep the loyalty of her men; so she responded with a stream of cursing in Arabic and kicked Tyler’s corpse.
She turns and touches Fadil on the shoulder. She tells him something in Arabic and Fadil calms down some.
“I am sorry Fadil, I had not known they were striking at you in this way, I might have played Tyler’s game differently,” I toss into the room.
Through gritted teeth Banafrit manages to ask, “What game?” She’s mad because Tyler was a mad dog of her making; her men knew it, I knew it. But she got careless and Tyler had been setting her up.
“Tyler told us that we could stop what was happening to the boy and the girl any time, we just had to offer him intel and take whatever he was doing to the mortals onto ourselves, I regret that I was not able to save the boy.”
Fadil stares at me, a look of confused anger on his face. “You let them do this? You let them?”
“No; Ephram was dead when he was brought in here. Tyler was going to torture and rape him no matter what I did; every time I intervened made it Tyler stronger. I’m sorry Fadil. All I could do was wait until they started playing with knives.”
My voice shakes a bit, not entirely feigned. But I bring the steel back in. “But once I had the chance I ended his pain. And hers. And,” looking Banafrit in the eye, “Katherine and I set about wiping that cunt from the face of the earth. In fact, I believe I told Tyler very specifically that this incident was going in my journal under that title. Didn’t I, Katherine?”
“You know, I do believe you did, Francis. I clearly recall ‘Ginger muschi’ being mentioned.”
“Oh. And we did this all while chained the fuck up. So. Kindly, arrange to put us back in comfortable chairs, remove these bodies, and get something to clean the blood up. Because your fucking mad dog really took the class out of this joint.”
And that, Banafrit, is a lesson in how your strip power from someone; by inches and degrees.
Her men looked at me with respect; at Katherine with fear. I was the man who, unable to stop a shameful thing, ended it at first opportunity. She was the witch who killed with a touch.
I wondered how long it take her to figure out why we were still here.
They gave us our chairs, removed the bodies, and brought down some comet and bleach to clean the floors. I tossed a couple of other suggestions to them which they grudgingly accepted. I was an enemy, yes, but one with a sense of honor.
Our third day…
Katherine and I were quiet that evening. The bravado from yesterday had fled, the role was drained out of us. We were exhausted and the lack of blood was taking a toll on me. Katherine had topped off with Tyler’s boys last night but even so had been forced to spend Vitae to fuel her magics.
“How do you think today is going to, Francis?”
I ponder it for a moment. “Right now Banafrit has been working her channels; the info she got from me is hardly complete and the kind of people she is working for won’t take kindly to a half finished job. She still needs you to leverage me; that hasn’t changed. But I’m pretty sure your boss has a condition monitor on you somehow; the Tremere back in Seattle seemed to do them easily enough. So he is going to be breathing down her neck to kill you…”
I pause and force myself down the dark roads.
“They will start with your ear, a toe, a finger. Then an eye. Then your feet, then hands. Banafrit isn’t an idiot so she won’t try to erase your image as a woman. But she will go for your tongue, to attack your image as a mage.”
Katherine nods; her reasoning went hand in hand with mine.
“But she won’t do anything like that till your boss shows up so he can counter any magic you toss with his own. So; tell me about your boss?”
“Albert Kinsey? Been dead since the 1880’s, is a crony of DiZagreb, rode that horse into the ground. He runs the, uh…” she trails off.
“Right, he’s local management.”
“Sure, I think you can say that. Or at least I can. He opposed the Bowsley plan in public; the only reason I didn’t take his job is that he is twice the brown nose that I am.”
“Decent mage?”
She snorts. “Utter shit, compared to me. But good enough for the job. Real manager type.”
“Right, so equal parts insecure and lacking ambition to competence. I bet Kinsey's boss is worried that if you get promoted that you will be gunning for more promotions.”
“Probably.”
“Good, I think I can…”
The door upstairs opens.
Banafrit comes down with her goons. Halima is trailing her, looking uncertain. “We are ending this today, Francis. Tell me who and what your network is, identify your allies, and give us details of your actions to date.”
“Erm… No.”
It was my slight pause that really aggravated her.
A forked tongue slips out of Banafrit’s mouth. “No?!”
“Not unless you give me something in return.”
She is taken aback. “I can kill you where you sit…”
“Then you risk nothing. And get everything. Kill me, and you risk everything.”
She stops, and just stares. “If I make you love me…”
“I will tell you everything then, too. You hope. But you’ve left me down here with a mage; I can tell you with absolute certainty that Tremere can fuck Presence into a pretzel.”
Banafrit glances at Katherine who just smiles and lifts her hand as far the chain will allow for a little wave.
“Tell you what Banafrit, I’ll go so far as to make you an offer. You let me and Katherine go, give us a car, and then we can help you get out of the country. If you don’t, well, you are on your own.”
She laughs, Banafrit, for about five seconds until she realizes I’m serious.
“I can’t do that…”
“Then, Q & A then.”
“Fine. But one lie…”
“And bad things happen.”
“First question: What is your plans for Ireland?”
“I don’t know, I won’t until I get inside her court.”
She is taken aback at this.
“My turn. Do you Followers of Set have a religious proscription to be Bond Villains? Serious question, it’s like you come from central casting for ‘bad guys-r-us’.”
Banafrit blinks. Clearly she was expecting something like ‘who hired you’.
“No. But when our God rises darkness will wash over the earth and we will rule as gods. Undermining the social orders of others aids in His rising.”
“Ah, I see. It also helps disrupt the power base of others and in the chaos it makes it easier to recruit if you’re the only stable element around.”
She nods.
“Your turn then, m’lady.”
“Why are you doing this?”
“Vengeance for my Grandsire. He had interests here and she killed them. Ventrue are very family oriented. Also, she is a two faced bitch who has been waiting for her shot to leverage the Ventrue into a negotiating position since Mithras disappeared. She does the Anarchs no favors and will rejoin the Camarilla as soon as it makes an offer she likes. This will weaken the Anarchs in a disastrous fashion as so many Brujah will lose heart in the cause once they get their nose rubbed in the hypocrisy.”
“That is… Surprisingly complicated.”
“Never said it was simple. So, what got you into this line of work?”
Again, she is taken aback. I keep asking the wrong questions.
“Kidnapping and murder for hire? I’ve always been good at it. Halima can be anyone she needs to be for short period; I’m good at getting info. Tyler used to be stable but lately he was claiming to have found a shortcut to Set and godhead.”
“Yeah, got that vibe from him. But you really just told me your resume. Why this line of work when so many others are out there?”
“I, well, the Followers took me in as a child, trained me. I was good at luring away the Ottoman’s soldiers, then robbing them after I cut them. This is what I know.”
“Fair enough.”
“What got you into your line of work?” Banafrit gives me the little ‘two can play at that game smirk’.
“The Great Game. In my mortal days it was East vs. West, as a ghoul it was Ventrue vs Tremere, today it is the Jihad and the End of Nights. I play the Great Game and I feel alive, always pushing up hills and to build faster than others can tear down. I’ve sacrificed nearly everything to the Game. Women, money, fame, and recognition all dust beneath my feet as I go to the next task.”
Katherine and I share a look. Our first and so far last night together we’d talked about this between sharing blood. We both loved the game for it’s sake, but she had seen where it could lead in a dark way.
“My turn then. Who is the man with the Roman spatha?”
Banafrit starts shaking.
“I cannot say his name. But it is he who hired me; who shall be your doom.”
“Not if I get him first,” I follow that up with a wink. She is still shaking.
“Banafrit, your guest has arrived!” Halima shouts down the hallway.
A thin bald man with wire rim spectacle and a tweed suit comes down the hallway, and all eyes are on him. Which means they aren’t on me. Last night Katherine had managed to lift the cuff keys from the ghouls using her magics, and then pass them to me.
So we were about as secured as a tourist's credit card at a hacker convention.
Kinsey takes in the room wild a cold glare. “Can I speak to you upstairs, Madame?” Chill, cold, and little off center. His rival was still alive, naked, filthy, and spattered with the blood of dead ghouls; but clear eyed and unbroken.
Banafrit, clearly angry that she wasn’t able to stage the situation more, stalks up the stairs after Kinsey. “Watch them!” she snaps out at two of her body guards, taking the other two upstairs. One of them left downstairs was Fadil.
After they were gone, I look at Katherine. “You know when they come back down they are going to kill you.”
Wistful, Katherine surveys the room. “Probably. How do you propose to change that?”
I start to exert my charm on the room, “Hey, Fadil, did your nephew get properly taken care of?”
He nods, “Yes, my sister is sad, but the Mistress make good.”
“Fadil, I’m sorry I couldn’t help more. Could I pester you for one thing? I’ve been dying for a cigarette; they don’t do much for me, but the habit, it stays with you.”
Fadil nods, pulls out a ciggy and lights it up for me, then gently passes to my lips. I suck a deep drag and blow it out my nose; contented look on my face.
“Say,” I manage around the smoke, “could you get one for Katherine, too?”
The other gent nods and pulls out a smoke and lights it for Katherine. He turns back to me to give me a thumbs up and turns back to Katherine except she has stood up and has placed her hand over his mouth. Has a moment of surprise before his brain boils and he drops to the ground silently.
Fadil is trying to shout, but I’ve spent precious vitae and the world is moving like molasses uphill. I’m behind him and I’ve got myself wrapped around him and fangs in his neck. He goes limp with ecstasy, the conditioning of a ghoul telling him to stop fighting as I replenish my reserves, heal my minor wounds, and take even more. I’ve been told that the last blood in a body, the Heart’s Blood is the most intense; I’ve never drained someone to death before.
It is a rush.
The power flooding, my heart beat matches Fadil’s, hammering fast and crazy and scared and then easing into bliss and swimming in a pool of joy; then dimming and fading as he bleeds out and the final few furtive pumps of his heart like a sparrow falling from a tree.
Katherine is feeding up as well, a look of distaste passes her face. “God, I hate it when it’s cooked; it curdles.”
We drag the bodies under the stairs and inventory. We have a sawed off shotgun, a belly gun the old men on my street called it. One Makarov, a boot knife, some cigarettes, matches, and a zippo lighter.
I find the plastic bucket used to clean up yesterday’s mess and the cleaning supplies - Bleach, comet flakes, and half a bottle of anti-freeze. And drain cleaner, bless their hearts.
I dump the bucket. Katherine is stripping her victim, looking for other items of use; she just settles on his leather jacket to cover herself. I disable half the lights plunging the back end of the basement in shadows. We hear a creak from upstairs and I find an old tea mug. I pour the drain cleaner into it.
“Katherine, love, I need Kinsey to be blind. I can handle the others; okay?”
“Francis, dear, don’t teach me how to fuck with a Tremere, more or less the first thing we learn.”
“Okay. Next thing is this will feel a little creepy, but roll with it.”
“You’re always a little creepy, and if you haven’t noticed, I’ve been taking the punches well,” Katherine kisses me fiercely. “You certainly are a dangerous man to know, Francis Casterly.”
The door opens upstairs and I step back from Katherine and pull the shadows in close. I’d always hoped to ask the Captain more about how this worked; but fear of the Elder was always a little squirrely for me.
Banafrit is walking down first, Kinsey second, the other two ghouls are following. They immediately note the lights are out, Banafrit sees the chairs are empty and rushes down two more steps before she realizes that she is in a world of hurt. The can of Comet is hovering above them on the stairs; the last guards face is just appearing at the top of the stairs, and Katherine is using her magics to hold the can steady in a line between me and that bodyguard.
I let fly with both barrels of the shotgun, and drop it, scooping up the Makarov.
The Comet explodes in a white cloud and the rearmost bodyguard goes down in a tangle of intestines and mangled bone.
Banafrit is screaming in panic; she’s got caustic soap in her eyes and mouth, she’s trying to go up the stairs but is tangled up in Kinsey, who is trying to see what is happening next but can’t because of the film of of comet on his glasses; that last bodyguard is staring down into the floor and is trying to pull his pistol out but is caught up on his compatriot who fell on top of him.
Initiative; can’t have with that.
I raise the Makarov and put two into his face.
Katherine is moving the drain cleaner to Kinsey now.
I train the Makarov on Banafrit and proceed forward, shooting measured shots into her head.
Katherine dumps the bucket full of drain cleaner on Kinsey; he screams as it reacts with the comet to start boiling his flesh.
With a choking scream Banafrit goes down. Kinsey is thrashing until I put the last two rounds in the Makarov into his head.
Katherine and I pick our way up the stairs; I make a slight pause to pick up the body guard’s pistol. We hear the door slam upstairs and a car start in the drive, screeching away. “That’ll be Halima,” we continue through the house. I find Bana’s materials and the dead drop details plus notes in a journal that were in code.
A cursory glance tells me that Banafrit was part of the Liverpool op which explains how i got dragged into this.
I manage to find a cell phone and some cash; time to call a cab.
I gather up my findings in a knapsack and Katherine calls me to a room upstairs. It’s a shrine of some kind, clearly Egyptian motifs. Fresh incense is burning, and small cat mummies are dissected around the shrine. Katherine and I look at each other and back away.
When we finally leave I’ve got a pair of ill fitting pants on, she’s wearing a suit jacket and that is it for clothing. The house is burning cheerfully behind us and we are walking out free and clear from this skeleton of a neighborhood.
Katherine is leaning into me; she kisses my cheek. “You know Francis, you take a girl to the weir-” and her head falls off, her hair becoming a cloud as it tumbles forward; the face going slack and the eyes blink twice before her face, that face, Katherine’s face starts to shrivel and collapse into ash and dust.
Something kicks me in the back and there is a tug on my shoulder as the blade comes free, along with the back pack. I roll over on my back and back lit by the flames is a cloaked man, with a Roman spatha, fire and smoke casting a halo of madness around him. He wipes his blade on his cloak and sheathes it, I note he holds his sword in his left hand which is a two fingered blue claw.
He looks at me, stares at me, measures me. And I get thrown back into the pond; he only killed Katherine because her neck was between his blade and the shoulder strap on the backpack. He turns, and walks to the fire, tossing the back pack into the flames, before stalking back. I see some fangs, possibly tusks, before his eyes glow red and whispers to me: “Flee.”
And I do. I flee. And because I am a Ventrue I can do it for hours without getting tired.
Oh God! Katherine!
The girls find me disheveled and weeping in the living room just before dawn, covered in ashes, blood, and self pity. They help me downstairs were the sun forces my waking nightmare to end.
26th May, 2014
Seattle, WA
He'd told the story glibly, as an anecdote. It wasn't enough to remove the stains, the scars. He couldn't... Katherine's face floating in a cloud; confused and slackening.
Because he'd sacrificed everything - And it was worth the cost.
