My Little Ventrue Pt. 03 Ch. 02

They turned into a hallway, and she frowned as she noticed the scratches along the walls. Some of the repairs weren't complete then, and bullets ricocheting down the halls had left damage. The flash memories of gunfire made her shivering worse, trapped in Lucas's grasp while a sortee of Kindred with guns unloaded ammunition upon the Prince. And then of course, the Prince ripping several of them to literal bits with her bare hands.

Natasha wasn't a stranger to violence. And when push came to shove, she knew she could handle it. Putting a bullet through Damien's skull just one example. But the sight of Kindred becoming an angry mob, and the following act of carnage and brutality, still made her stomach turn.

The two vampires walked down the hall, past the LED lights from carved holes above in the marble, past the quiet humming vents, past the various doors, before stopping at one particular door. She remembered this one, and she hesitated as Daniel reached out to open it.

"It'll be fine," he said, voice calm, face deadpan like always.

"Easy... for you t-t-to say, you... you're..." You're hundreds of years old and are comfortable with this insanity.

"You are not the child you once were, Natasha. And I... perhaps a little different as well?" He managed a slight raise of the brow, caught between question and statement.

Natasha had no choice but to smile at his sad attempt at persuasion. Cute, adorable even, but horrible.

He opened the door, and the two stepped into the wyrm's nest.

A giant room, tall but especially wide, and round. The walls were covered in white dragons painted onto the black marble, and a chandelier of crystal hung from above, a giant thing to match the giant room. The chandelier was lit with blue flame. How it made blue flame, if blue flame was toxic, if it was magical or scientific, she had no idea. But it was damn beautiful.

Perhaps more beautiful, or frightening, was the floor of the room. Upon the center, a white circle perhaps fifty feet wide was drawn, lines thick and arranged in patterns. Many, many patterns. As if someone obsessed with trigonometry had had too much caffeine and decided to draw every symbol they knew. Spirals, stars, pentagrams, cascading shapes of different sizes, to the point it was like trying to identify shapes in the stars.

Just being near it was enough to get her shaking again.

The Prince was standing by the circle. In front of her she held a large tablet, and beside her was a grand, half-circle desk covered in laptops and many objects Natasha did not recognize. As her eyes lingered on them, she winced as she realized one of the objects was a shrunken head. Other things on the desk also looked like shrunken body parts, fingers and hands. Some seemed attached to dolls that looked like dried-up humans, others attached to wood carvings like bowls. There were tied bags that looked like they were made of skin, and from within them stuck out bones that looked like they belonged on birds. Some feathers and sticks stuck out from the bags too, arranged deliberately.

"Miss Vola, how delightful to see you." The Prince set the tablet down on the table, walked up to her, and reached out with a single hand to touch her shoulder. A light touch, momentary, before she pulled it away. "I am glad you have returned to us."

"I am as well... my P-P-Prince." Miss Vola, not the Invictus title Madam Vola, but a regular way of saying a woman's last name. She had decades of habits to change.

"We are colleagues, Miss Vola. Prince is fine, no need for my."

Yeap, she'd definitely softened in the past fifty years. Or maybe since she'd starting dating Jack?

"Yes... P-Prince."

Antoinette chuckled, and reached over her shoulder to comb her white hair for a moment, before she turned back to the table before her.

"As you know Miss Vola, we are few in number here in Dolareido. I may be Prince, but I have not let the Kindred run rampant, nor do I wish for our order to become... mainstream, as my Jack would say. There is much to be said for fostering refinement and an eye for subtlety, for detail." The Prince started to circle the table, walking around it with her tablet up, taking pictures and jotting notes. "And such a keen eye is lost, I find, when swimming in swaths of colleagues. Objectivity is destroyed, and keeping an open mind not long thereafter."

Natasha froze. There was a but coming up. Where was the but, what was the but.

"But... I agree with Daniel. It is time for a change. With Lucas gone, as well as Viktor and Tony, perhaps I can stand to be more welcoming to newcomers, to those interested in the secrets of the order." A sly smile and a small gesture with her hand to Natasha followed. "Or welcoming back those that left before."

Oh. Maybe she was bitter about Natasha having left the order.

"I... I must apologize, Prince, for leaving! I... I had t-t-t-t-to... get away from..." Try as she might to not look at them, Natasha found her eyes stuck on the disgusting things on the table. Some of them had eyes! Little beady eyes that stared at her no matter where she moved.

"And that was our failing, Miss Vola. Do not worry, neither I nor your sire blame you for leaving. We introduced you to the secrets of the realm before we should have. But, you are much older now, are you not Miss Vola?"

She was older, much older. Half a century under her belt as a Kindred, and a lot of sights. A lot of things, a lot of misery and pain, a lot of victories and money. Stronger, faster, not necessarily braver.

But she could try to be, right?

"... what would you have me d-do, Prince? Sire?"

Daniel made his little smile, and the Prince mirrored it.

"For now, observe. There is power here in this room, Miss Vola, power of a sort beyond the simple understandings of science. Other members of the Ordo Dracul would perhaps say it is an act of god. But I know otherwise, little Mekhet. We shall explore these realms, you and I, and dip our toes into rivers sacred and forbidden, until secrets from the nether fill our minds. No mystery unexposed, no enigma we have not scrutinized."

Natasha could already feel the tremors come back, the shaking in her knees that vibrated up into her skull. The dead heart in her chest felt like it wanted to beat, just so it could burst. Why did the Prince have to make such a grand show of this sort of stuff, this mystical insanity?

Daniel raised a hand, and walked over to stand beside the taller woman.

"Prince, perhaps we should... ease her into this anyway?"

The Prince lowered her hands. Probably didn't even realize she'd started gesturing, like speaking to a crowd.

"My apologies Miss Vola. Needless to say, the studies of the occult fascinate me, and every night I am excited to see what arcane knowledge I can gleam. And I am excited that you are here to help, as my time is fought for from many directions; some I enjoy sharing it with, some I do not." She smiled, a mischievous smirk fit for a succubus. Definitely enjoyed sharing her time with Jack.

Trying to picture the little guy with the tall vixen was just impossible. Not that Natasha was one to talk, being so much shorter than an already short guy. Still, looking up at Antoinette made her mind wander, picturing the small, fit kid between her huge breasts.

Oh god she was turning into Jessy. She needed new friends.

"P-Prince, it's... I... it fascinates me too. And scares me."

"Fear will take you far in this life, Miss Vola. Too much, or too little, and you are either paralyzed or dead." Or both; it didn't need to be said. "But with a proper amount, you will be cautious and observant. Take this, for example." She set her tablet down on the table, and reached out for the shrunken head. No qualms about touching the dead flesh, the wrinkly skin or the old, frayed hair. "The Jivaro of Ecuador and Peru, famous for their practice of head shrinking. Again, mainstream. Now the power of this act, the implication, the belief of it, has lost weight. Wherever you go where the odd and peculiar are sold, fake bobbles next to fake shrunken heads rest." She walked toward Natasha, and held out the small thing on her palms, seated so it was looking at her straight on. "To find a real one is difficult. To find a real one, made from a human, on the night of a full moon, of the chief of a tribe, with a Kindred soaking the head in his own vitae during the ritual? There is but one, and this is it."

Natasha gulped on nothing, and stared at the little thing. Quite the resume.

"I uh... um... what's special about it?" Other than its impressive and traumatizing history.

"Touch it."

Oh god damn it.

The little Mekhet reached out, fingers quivering and arm shaking, and touched the thing's forehead. Immediate jolts of something cold hit her, something colder than room temperature would suggest, like prickly bits of ice. The head sat there, eyes closed, sewn lips unmoving. Her imagination ran away with her, made her imagine it opening its eyes, or trying to speak through the sewn lips, but it remained lifeless. But the touch was real, as if electricity had been reborn as a dead spark, and danced against where her fingertips touched the thing's ruined skin.

Intriguing and terrifying.

"Is it not?" the Prince said.

Natasha opened her eyes wide and looked up at her. No, not reading her mind. Natasha just wore her expressions on her face, and the Prince was good at reading people in general.

Now that she thought about it, she'd never talked with the Prince one on one, not really, not even when she was a member of the Ordo Dracul, protege of mentor Daniel. The Prince was talking to her like a proper colleague. What changed? The fifty years embraced, maybe?

"So it's uh... m-magical?" she said.

"Magic is a horrible word, Miss Vola. There are secrets to the world we do not understand. Hidden things, machines of divine scale, realms that run the currents of many realities, lying on the edges of our own. In the Ordo Dracul, some of us hunt secrets of the flesh, others the mind, others the world. And I hunt the secrets of the worlds beyond." The Prince walked into the heart of the circle, and placed the tiny head upon its center. "Energies, not magic. If we view them as things beyond understanding, we will never understand them."

Made sense. And she did want to understand how people like Lucas were able to call upon lightning. The disciplines of the Kindred were odd enough, but after enough time, she'd grown to view them as nothing more than aspects of her race, evolved predators. A bolt of lightning though? That was eye opening.

"Is that what this room is for?" Natasha said. "Finding secrets?"

"Indeed." Antoinette walked to the wall by the door, closed it, and reached over to the dial to dim the lights. The white LEDs faded away, until there was only the gentle blue glow of the chandelier fires above. "For today, you are to observe, and become familiar with the process."

What sort of process did one use for analyzing the occult and the mystical elements involved? Like asking someone who's been blind their whole life to describe color. But sure enough, Antoinette got the tablet again, and started to film the shrunken head.

Or at least, Natasha thought she was just filming it. But as the little Mekhet stepped closer, she realized the Prince wasn't using a common tablet. No brand on it, and it was very thick. She got around onto Antoinette's side, and looked through the picture being shown on the weird device.

"... infrared?" she said. The picture did look different from what she was seeing with her naked eyes. Lot of orange.

"No Miss Vola, but you are close." The Prince smiled at her and returned to the picture. She lowered it too, enough so Natasha didn't have to crane her neck to see. "Watch closely."

After a glance to Daniel to catch his nod, she set her eyes on the device, and watched the tiny head sit in the circle center. It just sat there of course, lifeless, because that's what dead things did. The irony.

Motion on the picture made her gasp, and she leaned in closer to stare harder at the picture. There was movement! Tiny, little wisps of color, a glint of blue mist that drifted with invisible currents. She snapped her head up to look over the device at the shrunken head, and where it sat upon the grand symbol. Nothing, just the quiet blue light from the odd chandelier above. But when she looked back at the tablet to watch the feed, she gasped again at the faintest wisp of moving blue against an otherwise very dark, orange-tinted image.

The wisps started to make a shape. Eyes glued to the screen, Natasha got closer until she was right next to the Prince, but she barely noticed. The wisp of blue was making an actual shape, a thing, something that stood on two legs. A person! A ghostly image against the orange background of the tablet's image, the blue shadow gestured, or at least looked like it did. Natasha could see what seemed like a head, legs, and arms, but no features, no eyes or fingers or toes. Still, with a few more minutes of staring, the image settled into something that did indeed seem human, and it started to walk around.

It came toward them. Natasha squeaked and jumped back, but the ghost thing didn't react. It turned around and back toward the circle center, and proceeded to pace around within it.

"... is... is it-t-t trapped?"

"Yes, but not by the circle. Whatever it is, it is bound to the head."

Chuckling, the Prince handed her the tablet. It was heavy, and thick. Expensive. Whatever technology the Prince had put into its development was not normal, not something the Invictus had, and probably not something any kine-run organization had. And, Natasha had to admit, there was a thrill to having a fortune at her back to fuel her new covenant's interests. The Invictus had money, but all they ever did with it was make more money, and vie for positions of power, to make more money. With the Ordo Dracul, they had a purpose.

But the purpose was terrifying. She could see a thing, an actual, real ghost thing, blue against the orange of the screen. Maybe blue because of the strange chandelier?

"D-do you know what it is?" she said. "... who it is?"

"I do not. Communication has been difficult. It does not see us or hear us. At least, not until I do this." The Prince reached out over the table of occult objects, grabbed a small, brown, flannel bag on a string, and hung it around her neck.

"What's in that?"

"The bones of children, and the dust of graveyards. The cloth is a burial shroud."

"... w-w-what?"

The Prince nodded, and stepped into the circle. "This charm was made a millenium ago."

Oh, not of her own making then. Good. Well, don't put it past the Prince to do something that gross in the pursuit of secrets either.

The white-haired woman walked up toward the shrunken head, and stood before it. As she did, the blue figure in the screen reacted, stepping aside to avoid touching her when she came before the head. It circled her, reached out to touch her, but its arms went through her body and found nothing. It tried again, but the ghost thing was slow to do anything, and each gesture and movement took many seconds.

But it did react to her, specifically her and her location. It wasn't just a weird movie on playback, or some afterimage of... something. Whatever it was, it was aware of her.

"It-t-t... it can see you?" You sound like straight out of a horror movie, Natasha.

"Or sense me. But it does not respond to my words, or my gestures. Only my location. And only if I am wearing the witch's charm."

Witch's charm? Oh god what crazy world had she let herself get pulled into. Just as she started shivering again, Daniel put a hand on her shoulder. He too was looking at the screen, and despite his glasses and deadpan face, she could see the same hint of intrigue there she knew she was wearing too; just without a bunch of a fear mixed in.

They were staring at something beyond the realm of the physical. There was a real, existing thing, moving and reacting to Antoinette as she walked around in the circle. Real. It was real.

Her knees started to rattle, and Daniel gave her a little shake of his own. A nod and small smile from him, and back to the display.

"Hidden things that Mekhet disciplines cannot see." Daniel let go of her and walked toward the table, where his gloved hands drifted over the many objects and items. "Just a handful of the strange objects we've collected over the centuries. Other members of the order have given them to us, hoping we can discover more about them. A daunting task, but we've been diligent."

Natasha raised a brow. Her sire, talking, for more than two sentences. He did that rarely.

"Tell me Miss Vola, what did you observe?" The Prince left the circle, returned the shrunken head and necklace charm to the table, and turned the lights back on.

Natasha looked back down at the tablet in her hand, and aimed it at the circle once more. Without the shrunken head or the dim blue light, all the screen showed was what her eyes could see.

"... whatever that was, it-t... it didn't leave the circle. And when you put the shrunken head down, it t-t-took time to appear." She looked back to the circle, then to the Prince. She wanted more. "It reacted-d to you only when wearing the charm, and it tried to touch you. It... it only appeared through whatever wave spectrum this device is listening for, and only when the only light visible was from the chand-d-d... d-delier. The... thing, was the color of the blue fire, despite the filter on this device being very orange. So the d-d-device was filtering for something that only the blue light can expose. But I cannot t-tell if the symbol on the floor is... relevant."

Tough, to talk that much. Each stutter was an annoyance, each pause an embarrassment. But the Prince waited, nodding with each statement, patient.

"A thorough breakdown to be given in such a short time. Excellent. That is what we need, what I need, in a new member of the Ordo Dracul. I cannot abide Kindred throwing subjectivity and bias into their analyses."

"B-bias?"

"Yes. Can you imagine the sort of drivel I would have to contend with if your friend Miss Herrington were asked to make an objective report of what she saw?"

Natasha giggled, and swung a hand up to her mouth to cover it. Probably something along the lines of 'blue ghost thing danced around the Prince and tried to cop a feel'.

"Do you have the gift of spirit touch, Miss Vola?"

"Spirit touch? You mean, see an ob-bject's past? Secrets? No. Sire can, and Damien can, but it isn't a skill I've learned." It came easier to some Kindred, but never her. She wanted to see things clearly, and her brain just didn't like the vague imagery of what the auspex showed.

"Just as well, such images can be misleading. And your sire explains that you have an unnatural talent for clear sight, even in the darkest corners?"

"I d-do... Prince. I can... I'm good at that."

"Excellent. With the recent deaths of three elders, I am afraid the climate of the city has changed." The Prince walked around the table a bit, sliding her finger along its edge, before picking up another one of the strange objects. This one was a human hand, a dried and wrinkled thing but still at full size. An eye was tattooed onto its palm, and string was wrapped tight around the cut wrist. And of course, a stick the size and length of a forearm was fixed to the wrist. Because that's what people wanted to wave around like a wand, a human hand on a stick.

"A hand of glory," she said. "This one, I have not the details save for three. It is of a woman's hand, that a thousand lives perished for her cruelty, and that the hand is at least five hundred years old." Delicate fingers held it horizontal, and she set it upon Daniel's open hands. Vampire skin had no harmful oils unless they were blushing life; probably a key part in how long the objects had survived in such good condition.