My Little Ventrue Pt. 03 Ch. 12

Damien looked at Jack. Not sure why he was looking to him, but Jack sighed and nodded. They couldn't sneak up on a werewolf, not one as strong as Avery anyway.

The four of them stepped out around the curve of the tunnel as Damien turned off the cloak, leaving them exposed. Fiona stood beside Beatrice, and glowered at the glaring Uratha, like she'd been personally slighted.

"... I suppose this is the Azlu," Avery said, eying Fiona with the same sort of expression Fiona was giving her.

Fiona, tiny before the grown Uratha — unusually tiny considering all the werewolves looked to have grown a foot in height — stood her ground, and marched up to Avery. Right up to her, glared at her, and frowned a frown so adorable it was enough to make Avery smile. Too damn easy to like her, even for the werewolf pack's alpha.

"And if I am?"

"I know you're not." Avery shrugged, and motioned around them. "Sorry about the rest of my pack, none of them have ever been near an Azlu before; other hosts sure, but not Azlu. They don't know how it feels, or the scents to smell for. Plus," Avery gestured to the tunnel the gang had passed through, "by the point they're harvesting kills, Azlu no longer look human."

"So..." Jack walked up to stand beside his friend, and tilted his head to the side to look up at Avery. "So you made a mistake?"

"Yeah, we did." Avery nodded, and gestured to her fellow wolves. "Not that it would have mattered if you and your friends would have listened and stayed out of the way."

Jack looked back at Damien and Beatrice, and they frowned with the same thoughts. The wolves were ok with killing an innocent when on their warpath.

Not good enough.

"And?" Jack said. "What, you would have killed Fiona, chalked it up to an accident when you realized she wasn't your prey, and continued your hunt?"

Avery nodded, even as Clara beside her grimaced.

"Exactly. The hosts need to die, Kindred. I don't expect you to understand, just like I didn't expect that Begotten back there to understand." Avery gestured back to the tunnel, talking about Athalia. "If that means some people get caught in the middle, that's a risk I'm willing to take."

What a bitch.

"You can't seriously—"

"Look, Jack," Clara said, "you should get out of here. We're trying to find our two missing, we know they're down here. But we can smell the Azlu, and it's going to rip you guys to bits. Leave and get somewhere safe. We won't hunt Fiona."

Jack sighed as he looked Clara in the eye. At least they knew now that the wolves weren't going to hunt Fiona anymore. Fuck, if they'd just let Avery see her earlier, the whole situation could have been avoided.

"But Natasha's down here too," he said. Maybe he shouldn't have said it, with the hard glares the wolves gave him. They were pushing their luck, not listening, arguing.

Avery shrugged with all the compassion of a brick. "Yeah well, if—"

Everyone went silent as they turned to look back the way the gang had come from.

Athalia came running, or stumbling very quickly, each step carving agony into her face with a knife, but not enough to stop her from driving forward toward them. "It's coming!"

And that was it. That was all anyone needed to hear to react. All the hate and rage and building aggression snapped like a guitar string tuned too tight, complete with the crack that cut skin.

The three vampires and the two monsters stepped aside as all eleven werewolves marched toward the tunnel, from where Athalia had been running. And as they marched, the beasts in them emerged. Jack's jaw dropped and his body froze as the already unusually enlarged Uratha enlarged once again, getting taller, thicker, muscles threatening to burst through their attire; instead, fur overtook their clothes, and it vanished into their bodies. But no amount of fur could hide the almost grotesque size of their muscles, their power, their weight.

The pack of werewolves stepped forward, standing upright despite their titanic size. With their mutant wolf heads, Jack couldn't help but picture the werewolves moving on all fours, but they walked upright, and their hands and feet weren't paws, but monstrous appendages with claws, claws that scraped and scratched the metal and concrete underneath them through sheer weight and sharpness.

Holy fuck.

Fiona and Damien grimaced as they stared at the passing titans; they'd seen them before, but Jack hadn't, and neither had Beatrice. Jack's mouth was still open, and when he looked her way, hers was too, exposing all her extra teeth and wide snake eyes. No wonder people were afraid of these things, they were just like the beasts of legend, the giant wolf monsters that devoured and destroyed, unstoppable juggernauts. Mindless animals.

One of them wasn't transformed though. Still in his unusually enlarged human body, but at least still human looking. He came over to them, several huge duffel bags hanging from his also huge shoulders.

"... I remember you," Jack said. Saw him with the rest of the pack when he first met Avery.

"Surprised. Name's Mason." The big guy smirked, and set the bags down. After unzipping them, he started setting aside the contents. Bottles with rags in their tops, and some sort of large gun... with a canister attached to its underside.

The three Kindred stepped away.

"Molotovs?" Beatrice said. "And... a fucking flamethrower."

"Told you Kindred to stay out of this. Don't blame us if you get set on fire." The man shrugged, and pulled out a lighter. "But you're here now, stuck. Stay back here. Maybe try tearing down this wall while we're busy? Who knows, your friend might still be alive if she was down here with Art and Matt."

The gang was literally stuck between a rock and a hard place.

Athalia reached them at last, though the werewolves each gave her long, hard glares as she limped by, and more than a few snarls and half-roar half-barks. But eventually she got to her fellow Begotten, and she collapsed against the wall again, enough hate painted on her face to kill anyone stupid enough to touch her. Jack was half tempted to ask why she was so angry all the time. Not the time, definitely not the time.

Caught himself before putting his foot in his mouth. What do ya know, growth.

"Ye saw it?" Fiona said, getting down on a knee beside Athalia.

"Yeah, giant spider monster, just like these bastard dogs said." She spat on the ground and cradled her bad shoulder with her good hand. "Must have been down here for months, hiding."

"So... what do we do?"

"We get out of here and back to Azamel when we can, before these idiot beasts get us all killed."

Mason didn't like that. He turned to look at the sitting woman, and offered her a scowel. "You really have a stick up your ass, you know that? Just shut up, sit down, and wait." Another snarl later, Mason walked off to join his fellow wolves.

Leaving the five of them sitting there, in front of a giant wall of rubble, while eleven werewolves disappeared around the tunnel turns.

"I... guess we get digging?" Jack said.

Triss, laughing and shrugging, approached the wall of debris and started sliding down rocks. Damien and Jack watched on while Fiona chatted with Athalia about being Begotten, until the Nosferatu stopped and looked at them.

"... what the fuck, why am I the only one working?"

Jack put up a hand. "I'm a Ventrue, I'm a talker, not a doer."

Damien put up a hand. "I'm a Mekhet, delicate hands."

Didn't expect Damien to make a joke, and Jack found himself laughing despite the scenario, despite everything. Even Triss laughed, and laughed as she walked closer, and put her hands on their shoulders. Then she squeezed, and everyone stopped laughing as she threw the two of them at the rubble.

"Fine!" Groaning and whining, Jack gave Athalia his spare flashlight, put his gun away, and got digging. Ventrue were hard to kill, sturdy, good at using the power of the blood to become almost invincible. They weren't good at lifting heavy objects.

For just a moment, he forgot there was a giant spider monster behind them, and a bunch of werewolves between it and them. But then the sounds started. Shrieking. One time he looked up a video of what it sounds like when a fox cries; a bone-shrilling sound. It was sort of like that, louder, heavier, enough that it almost shook the walls with the curdling screams.

Everyone got digging except Athalia. The only one with the strength to make any real progress was Triss, and she lifted rocks easily a hundred pounds and rolled them away. Tossed a few of the bigger rocks when she managed to get her claws on them, hard enough so they cracked or broke on contact. More than once or twice, Fiona stopped to watch Triss pick up things that were as likely as heavy as Fiona herself, nearly as heavy as Jack, only for Triss to chuck them away ten or twenty feet.

"What?" Beatrice said. "Your Vrall horror thing can't lift heavier? Seemed like it could."

"Maybe, but... picking up rocks like that is... nae exactly how she—how I'd do it. She'd use webbing, from above, likely."

"Yeah?"

"Mhmm. She's done things like in her jungle lair."

"Jungle lair?"

"Aye! There's this jungle with two moons. It's dark there, the canopy is thick, and there are many dead there, from well before I became Vrall."

"Two moons?"

Jack raised a brow, and looked Triss up and down. She kept asking Fiona questions, and Fiona kept answering them, talking about her dream world, her scary lair, how she met Damien there as Vrallar'trakla of the Eight Blade Arach, whatever that was. She went on about feeding, biting to eat but needing to punish abusive people to get sustenance from it, about how she used to have dreams about being devoured by darkness, by things in the shadows with webs and fangs. Went on about what it was like being devoured in her own nightmare, accepting it, and waking up as this horror, this nightmare incarnate. Her true self.

With every sentence, Triss nodded along, asked a few more questions, and tossed a few more rocks. Seemed to be how she liked to work, talking like this. Jack could never do that. Jack wanted silence, or music, but Triss seemed to enjoy the conversation. Which of course meant Fiona was excited to talk; just like Mary would have been.

He smiled. Triss probably would have liked Mary, which was a very very weird thing to imagine. But there it was in front of him, the badass and once quite the surly woman, chatting — mostly listening — to Fiona talk, and enjoying it.

Jack looked Athalia's way. She had a brow raised as she listened. Probably because they were talking like nothing was wrong despite death coming down the tunnel.

"Your horror," Athalia said, "came with a name?"

Or maybe not.

"Aye. I guess that's nae normal for Begotten is it?" Fiona stopped putting down rocks long enough to wipe some sweat from her brow and smile at the woman with the web-wrapped leg. "I—"

Another howl ripped through the tunnel, and everyone looked back toward the darkness. Mason had brought his two lanterns with him, but the light wasn't rounding the bend of the tunnel where the wolves went. The Uratha were still out there then, a ways off, doing whatever it was they were doing. Every so often another roar filled the tunnel, distant but loud nonetheless, and Jack shivered as the strange animal sound filled his core.

Maybe that's what Triss was doing, just keeping Fiona's mind off of the terror behind them. Keeping all their minds off the madness happening behind them. Sounded like the sort of thing a Carthian would do; Invictus would just say 'shut up and do it.'

"Careful," Damien said as he climbed a few feet of the sloping hill of rubble. "The ceiling of this tunnel is a mess. More than the concrete caved in, but much of the earth as well."

"Think Natasha survived?" Jack said. Dumb question. Foot in mouth again, damn it.

Damien sighed, and made a tiny wince as he started pulling down some of the smaller rocks from the top. "I have no idea. I hope so."

"... you do seem to care about her." He climbed up to join Damien closer to the top of the rubble, just a few extra feet off the ground, so they could start moving more of the higher rubble down to the bottom.

"Is that strange?"

"Yeah, it kind of is, considering what happened."

Damien stopped digging long enough to glare at him. "You still doubt me?"

"No, no, you've proved you're not the man I thought you were." Jack shrugged and pulled down a rock, a big one, one Damien had to help him with. Perfectly timed to be nicely symbiotic; on purpose of course. "Just, you two seem to have this weird relationship. The way you glance at each other every so often, makes me think you're old friends who had a falling out, you know? Sort of trying to ignore how much you hurt each other in the past."

"You... may have a point, Jack." Another wince from the assassin before he grabbed another rock. "I owe her an apology, but I can't seem—"

"Oh for the love of god!" Athalia threw up her good arm, eyebrows furrowed and dripping of more of that hate she seemed to carry around in infinite supply. "You understand the precarious situation we're in? Stop gossiping, stop chatting, stop acting like a bunch of children, and do something!"

The four of them stopped digging, and stared at the woman. But, after a while, Triss started laughing, then Fiona, and everyone started digging again. Jack had half expected Beatrice to throw a rock at her, but the Nosferatu was smiling bigger than any of them; mostly because she had a crocodile mouth that could fit an unusually large smile.

"Let me have a go at something. Everybody get back." Fiona put up her hands and motioned for the gang to step away. Once the three Kindred were behind, the little redhead motioned them even further back, until they were maybe fifteen feet away and spread out toward the walls.

Then the legs came out. Fiona pointed her hands at the rock wall, and eight of her enormous spider legs shot out from the air behind her. More than just her legs. Lit by their flashlights, the horror inside the little girl showed itself as it... she stood behind and over Fiona, her immense legs striking out against the rock while she hovered. Jack could see where the legs connected this time, the body they were connected to, and his jaw dropped as he stared at the spider goddess Vrallar'trakla.

Goddess was the better word, now that he could see it. Her. She was wearing a dress of what looked like spider silk, dangling loose like a sash that hugged her curvy figure. Her very curvy figure, with a waist inhumanly tiny, but arms and legs of normal proportion. No feet, instead her legs came to sharp points an extra foot below where her feet should have been. No eyes, but giant horns that pulled back to join more horns that curved back from her skull. Her fingers and thumbs were three giant claws, and her skin was the color of dark steel.

The Begotten's horror's legs each stabbed at the wall, but also the ceiling above it, and stabbed, and stabbed, each leg sinking into rock and rubble. When they pulled away and stabbed again, webbing was left behind. Two webs began to form, one attaching a multitude of rocks together at the rubble while simultaneously pulling it down every so often, the other web covering the ceiling like a net. With speed and accuracy, Vrall reinforced the rock above them, web growing out and attaching to strong points along the ceiling to keep in the looser points, while she also pulled down the wall of rubble blocking their path.

"In her lair, she isn't separate from the horror's body," Damien said, stepping over a couple times to stand beside Jack. "Truly terrifying."

Truly terrifying indeed, but oddly attractive. Something about the way her human-like body held the silk dress, the way her tiny, ridiculously tiny waist accented the hips and other curves. Jack always was kind of into monster girls — too much internet — and he couldn't help but stare at the lovely monster before him. He'd half expected her to have the big abdomen of a spider, but she didn't, her human half was more like some sort of ancient demon woman, who happened to have eight gigantic spider legs jutting out of her back.

This was the thing he felt from Fiona whenever he was near her, this ancient, deadly goddess creature. Didn't seem like Fiona at all, like it matched her at all, and yet there it was.

With a hard tug Vrall yanked down a bunch of the wall, and everyone jumped back as the shattering concrete spread out around the tunnel. Athalia sighed and shook her head.

"You'll bring the whole wall down on us," she said. "Be careful."

Fiona nodded and resumed, more webbing, more layers, more nets above to try and reinforce what was probably a lost cause. But something was better than nothing, and if Vrall's webs could keep the tunnel from falling down on their heads, Jack was all the happier to let her do the work.

More roars filled the tunnel behind them, closer this time. He could hear the shattering of a bottle, and an ear-piercing shriek to follow. Molotovs. What would happen if one of those things hit an Uratha? For a Kindred it'd be instant death. Maybe an elder Gangrel or Ventrue could summon the defensive reflex of vitae to deal with it, but even in that circumstance, being lit on fire was usually guaranteed death. For him, or Triss or Damien? No chance, they'd be ash.

More roars came closer. Jack looked behind him, along with Damien, and the two stared at the curve in the tunnel where the werewolves had disappeared, where Athalia had said the monster was. They could hear it now, not just its shrieks, but the stab of its feet against the ground, each making a weird scraping sound like nails scratching concrete or metal.

"Um... I think they're coming this way," he said.

Damien nodded "Plan?"

Jack sighed, gulped, and took a deep breath. He'd never get over that reflex, none of them would apparently. With a sigh, he drew his large knife and pistol. Damien did the same, sword and pistol, and the two of them waited for the oncoming chaos.

"Um... can ye hear something?" Fiona said, still working at the wall.

"Can hear a lot of things right now." Triss walked over to stand by the boys, off to the side though with her back to the tunnel against the inside of the turn. Maybe she'd try and leap out to attack whatever this thing was that was fighting off eleven titans and fire. Yeah, right.

"I mean, I think... I think there's something digging from the other side! Maybe it's Natasha, or her two friends?" Fiona dug faster, more webbing coming out and yanking down the rubble wall as the spider goddess stabbed into the rock faster and faster.

Jack stepped back to get closer to Fiona, and peered at the rubble as Fiona peeled off the layers. "... yeah I can hear it too." Scraping, claws maybe? Someone was on the other side for sure at least, someone strong enough to move rocks. Natasha did come down here with two werewolves, and Natasha was a Kindred herself; even Mekhet were far stronger than any normal human, strong enough to move some rocks. It could be her.

More rocks fell away, and more, until a small opening was created at the top. Fiona focused on that area, a host of webbing netting together against the rock and dragging it down together like a fishing net. And as the roars and tearing sounds from behind grew closer, she worked faster, getting clumsy and yanking down a lot of rocks at once.

"Ok, that's enough." Damien climbed up the rubble and stood before the dip in the pile where there was room enough for him to go through it, just below the ceiling. He didn't though, thank god; man wasn't a total idiot. He did peer through the darkness though, and tapped on the rocks a few times with his sword. "Hello? Natasha?"

No answer.

Damien held out his hand, Triss gave Jack her spare flashlight, and Jack climbed up to join the man before giving it to him. Still no answer, and as Damien shined his light into the black, both Kindred squinted their eyes to see what lay beyond.