My Little Ventrue Pt. 04 Ch. 02

"Thank you."

"For what, dear?"

"For... I d-don't know, talking about this sorta stuff with me, even though I'm... p-pretty shy about this kind of stuff."

"Ah, my dear, it is I that must thank you. Your sire does not share my passion for sexuality, and not since... Tony's youth, when he went by a different name, have I engaged in such delightful conversation. To gossip, and talk of men and sex? A guilty pleasure if there ever as one." She removed another piece of clothing from the wardrobe, a nightie, a tiny thing that was very see-through, and very lime. And now that Natasha was staring at it and Antoinette in this whole new, mind-shattering light, she realized the Prince was handling the clothes of not just her ghouls, but two women she'd spent many years having sex with on a regular basis.

Little bit of bias then, maybe, from Antoinette about the clothes Natasha should wear. Well, maybe bias, but still true. Maybe not so true that she'd start wearing pink all the time, or sundresses, but maybe, on occasion, for fun? It could be fun. It would be fun!

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

~~Beatrice~~

She shuddered, and rubbed her arms. Not like she felt terribly cold, being Kindred and all, but it seemed like the thing to do while in a tank top, in the Three Kings Cemetery.

The Dolareido Cathedral, Lucas's masterpiece, wasn't too far away. Beatrice wouldn't be surprised if Maria was in there right now, playing some music like she knew the old Nosferatu could. Maybe Damien was in there too? Maybe. But, not why she was here.

Jacob was wearing his robes, long black things that reached down to his ankles, and worn with what must have been decades of use. Maybe even centuries, if it was treated to last. Whatever it was made of, it wasn't the sort of thing you'd wear in public, cause it screamed witchcraft and occult and other crazy shit; not good for blending into a crowd. The elder kept them both hidden in his cloak of night discipline, and considering his power, his age, it was more than strong enough for them to basically disappear from existence.

"We gonna dig up a corpse?" she said.

"Did you want to?"

"What? No. The fuck? I was joking."

"Just as well, there's no one in this cemetery worth digging up." The old man shrugged and wandered through and between the tombstones, occasionally chuckling when his gaze landed on a tombstone he recognized. "The three kings were greatly overrated."

Three Kings Cemetery, named as such for being the burial site of three kings. Not real kings, but three people who'd been quite famous early on in Dolareido's life. Mob bosses maybe? Nah, earlier than that. Three criminals from when the city was damn young, and who'd managed to make themselves some tiny empires. But all things come to an end and their corpses were found here, in what had become the biggest and creepiest cemetery in Dolareido.

Withered trees. Dozens of mausoleums of varying sizes. Tombstones with statues on them, people on horses, of women in robes holding someone's body, or baby angel things—cherubs. Bits of leaves blew by, along with some twigs that fell from the trees. The moonlight was casting powerful shadows, as the cemetery was far enough from brighter sections of the city to allow some of the sky to be visible. And without the tall buildings around it, the wind picked up enough speed to get the trees moving, their branches dancing, and the shadows coming to life.

Rows upon rows upon rows of graves. Sometimes it was easy to forget Dolareido was a pretty damn old city, even for Beatrice, who hung out in a fucking catacomb. And with so much age and history to the city, elders with some seriously old tastes got to indulge in their macabre delights. Which was cool and all, Beatrice did love that shit.

"I have to wonder," she said as they walked past some of the larger tombstones, "what sort of shit you elders did when this city was growing up."

"Oh, such a tale! That boy Tony — Jacques at the time — was always stirring up trouble in the quaint little village, while we created our thralls, dug our tunnels, took over the whole town. They had a city council of nothing but our thralls. Such glorious days, when we only had to herd a few thousand, instead of millions. When there were no cameras or internet, and we were free to turn the town into our playground come nightfall." He chuckled a few times, and came to a stop in front of one of the smaller tombstones. A carving of a cross was on it, and a stone rose. "I had three Kindred at the time in my circle, and we loved to catch bandits and sacrifice them; Antoinette preferred we spared those who deserved life even then. The blood poured, and we howled at the moon as we danced naked and summoned spirits you would not believe exist."

"Jesus. What happened to them? Your circle."

"Dead." Jacob paused by another grave, this one with a tombstone that carried no statue, but held some words: Death Comes For Us All. Fucking delightful. "Hunters."

"I've heard that word a few times now, but no one ever goes into detail. Hunters? We've had no hunters in Dolareido since I've been Kindred, far as I know."

"And you are likely correct."

"What happened to them?"

"Oh, they're still out there." He shrugged as he came to another tombstone, where another quote was found: Fuck You Carl. He laughed and continued on, glancing around at everything they passed like someone revisiting their old high school. "But like the Kindred, they had to adapt. Instead of marching into town wearing necklaces of silver, bones, charms, with pistols and swords and torches, now they hide in back alleys and with walls of meat and technology between us and them. Gangs, or organizations that seem innocent, but are very much not."

"You mean... in Dolareido?"

"Perhaps. I know much, as does Antoinette, and even the worthless triumvirate of the Invictus know plenty about the ongoings in the city. It would seem the city is free of that pest. But we cannot safely say that hunters do not hide in our midst."

She shivered and looked around. "They uh... must be doing a good job of hiding, if we haven't heard of them in decades."

"Far more likely they aren't hunting in Dolareido. There are a lot of other cities with a Kindred presence who aren't nearly as kind as we are. Lucas and Viktor and their cruelty are the norm for the elders, after all. Antoinette and I and our compassion are the exception." He laughed again, knowing full well Beatrice didn't think of either of them as compassionate. Maybe not insane with bloodlust and violent tendencies, but certainly not compassionate.

She shivered a few more times, and stopped to stare at a tall statue. An angel, with robes hanging over her whole body so the face was hidden in shadow. She was pouring a jar of water, the fluid carved of stone, onto the tombstone beneath her. Beautiful. And totally at odds with the overall creepy vibe the cemetery gave off.

"So, why are we here?"

"You wanted to explore crúac rituals, didn't you?"

"Yeah but, I figured we'd want to do that somewhere private? This is a cemetery, a public one at that, and Maria's not even a mile away." Assuming she was in her Cathedral. Hers, since Lucas was gone.

The man chuckled, and motioned with his head for her to follow. He stepped into one of the mausoleums, and she stopped outside it to look up at the arch of the small, stone building. Pillars lined the sides of the entrance, and a cross decorated the arch's face. Old, worn stone, and a gate made of two wooden doors, lined with metal. A single step lead up to the small gate, and beside it, statues of the virgin Mary stood with arms outstretched. They too were worn with time, features washed away, and the stained stone looked almost like it was bleeding discoloration.

She stepped into the mausoleum, and shuddered. Mountains of nameless bones she could handle, but a mausoleum like this gave everything a name. It was just a big room, really, with most of the space taken up by shelves of marble, dark and dead. Coffins, each with a name, and each beside a drawer of some sort. Personal belongings probably. And some of the drawers were cracked, with bits of the rock on the floor so the cracks exposed the contents. One of them held what looked like a shaving kit from two hundred years ago. Another held a very creepy doll.

At this point Jacob withdrew an LED lantern. Not a real lantern, cause no Kindred liked using fire if they could avoid it, and not a typical flashlight, because that wouldn't appeal to an elder's nostalgia. No, the man had a lantern with an LED source of light, but also fashioned to look oldschool. She smirked at him, and he returned it with his own, before he pressed on a very specific part of a specific crack of one of the shelves.

The floor slid aside. Beatrice squeaked and jumped back as the sound of sliding stone filled the mausoleum. Straight out of a fucking eighties action flick, the stone moved aside to reveal a stairway, the only source of light being a glimmer of moonlight through the cracks in the roof, and Jacob's lantern as he approached the descending tunnel.

"Come on. Pussy." He smirked at her again, even chuckled a little, and disappeared into the blackness.

Gonna kill him, gonna fucking kill him. She hopped over to the opening side of the stairway, and descended after him. A very tiny tunnel, so tiny she had to crouch to keep moving with the stairs; nothing she wasn't used to dealing with, considering the entrance to their usual home. And once she had her head under the stones, Jacob pulled down on some sort of metal crank handle on the wall. The floor above her shifted, and slid back into place, giving her a little more headroom. Standing up, she glanced around at the darkness, at the long shadows cast by the one source of light, and how the stone under the earth was so very worn, and wet.

She could smell the dead. And more than just the very old dead, but also the recently dead. The fuck was Jacob up to?

"Guess this is one of your secret places then?"

"Yeap. Only Daniel and Antoinette know about this, and they respect my privacy."

What a weird relationship between them, that Jacob could be building secret rooms, and they'd just let him.

"They don't spy on you?"

"Sometimes they try, but it's rare. Daniel has to go through quite the song and dance to try and spy on me, and what little he learns, most often, I let him learn it." He raised the lantern up the spreading walls, and showed where strange symbols or runes were drawn in what must have been blood. Not like blood lasted forever, so, he must have been renewing them. "And with a few specific rituals, I can defend my ritual areas from his prying auspex."

"Really? Damn." Cause she knew how deadly that shit was in the hands of a master. Might as well have been trying to stop a ghost from spying on you. "And what sort of nasty shit do you practice down here?" That apparently he trusted her with knowing. Made her kind of proud and happy, but she wasn't about to let him know that.

The tunnel was very oldschool, and she half expected it to collapse on her at any moment. But there were wooden beams within, holding up the thousands of pounds of dirt and rock, and they themselves seemed pretty sturdy. Still, hard to ignore the fact she was underground, something that she was normally used to dealing with, but these wet, dripping rocks, and the complete and total lack of stonework or architecture, made it seem like she was walking through an abandoned mining tunnel.

At least until she came upon one of the support beams along the ceiling with an old wooden plank hanging from it. Something was burned into the wood: Continue Forth, and Death Awaits Thee. And hanging from the sign were several skulls dangling from chains, with hooks driven through their temples.

"Your doing I assume?"

"Actually that was Jean's doing."

"Jean?"

"One of my circle, when the city was still young. Three Kings Cemetery has existed for quite some time — for an American city anyway — and this tunnel was one of the first places I taught my pupils the dark rituals." He brushed the skulls aside and continued on. Beatrice ducked.

"What happened to him?"

"Hunter killed him. Got him with a stake in the heart, then cut off his head when he was paralyzed."

"Fuck, man. When was this?"

"The 1820s, I believe. Hard to remember the details. Except for, you know, the head removal part."

Right, right, that memory. God she was following someone with a volatile memory, and that added a whole new level of fear to her adventures. For all she knew, he was going to forget something important and get them both killed. It was like trusting herself to someone who was randomly senile.

Eventually the tiny tunnel opened into a large cavern, a very familiar one at that. She'd never seen it before, but the bone decorations were similar to the ones in their home cave, hundreds of them from every part of the human body arranged to create a tapestry of patterns and designs. In this cave, the pattern looked almost like the waves of an ocean, the sort of ocean where you could hear the howling of wind.

And she could hear howling. Quiet, distant, but there was some sort of howling sound in the darkness of the cave. No candles lit, so the only light source was Jacob's one lantern, and despite how it was a solid light unlike a candle flame, the shadows she found around her flickered.

In the center of the obsidian that surrounded them, sat a bowl. Unlike the blood bowl in their usual cave, this one sat closer to the ground, and was held above the ground by skeletons. Someone managed to get skeletons lying on their stomachs, some on their back, with arms up to press against the massive bowl's undersides. The bowl itself looked like it was carved of stone, and someone had chiseled some intricate lines along its edges, lines that looked like dripping liquid.

Above the enormous bowl, was a corpse. Some woman was hanging, naked, with arms up high and a chain around her wrists. In her stomach were several knives, still in there in places where it'd take a long time to die. The woman's face was aimed down, her jaw open, eyes wide; the pain and fear were still visible in her expression.

"I thought... you used vitae to perform these rituals, vampire blood," she said.

Jacob set the lantern aside, and stood by the edge of the bowl on the other side. "Yes, but if you're going to be bleeding yourself to fuel your rituals, it's nice to have a snack."

"That's not a snack!" She pointed up at the naked corpse. Woman looked to be in her twenties, but her skin was sunken into her body with how drained she was. "That's—"

"Please, your misplaced ethical dilemmas are unneeded. She came from another city and started peddling heroine to some youngsters. Dolareido embraces drug use, but not like that." He chuckled a few more times, each chuckle a little louder than the last, before he reached out to push the feet of the hanging body. "This is a nice neighborhood, after all." The corpse eased back and forth, just hard enough for Beatrice to hear the creak of the chain around her wrists against the wooden beam from above. The quiet howling was still there, but Beatrice couldn't place its origin, as if the stone walls were echoing the dead woman's cries.

The shadow of her swinging feet flickered on the walls.

"So you tortured her to death?"

"A few knives to the gut hardly counts as torture."

"Most people would disagree."

"We aren't most people." The man stepped around the bowl again to come beside her, and he leaned in closer until his bandage-covered eyes were only inches from her. So close, even in this darkness, the lantern provided enough light she could see the gray lines in his hair. "You want to explore the power to be found in witchcraft, in blood rituals, then grow up. There are witches out there who will bleed another Kindred dry, to fuel rituals so insane you could not fathom." He came a step closer, and she had to take a step back from him to make room. "There are Kindred out there who have drunk other Kindred down to the fucking soul, absorbed their entire essence, absorbed what made them who they are, just so their own blood would have the power to perform the most heinous of rituals."

Diablerie. He was fucking talking about diablerie.

"... we wouldn't do that."

"Oh yes we would. Perhaps not you, and, perhaps, not I, but diablerie exists, and it is a tempting proposition. The sweet taste of a soul." He touched his lips, licked them, before he smirked and shrugged. "Not that I would know."

Fuck. Now she had a new thing to suspect her boss of. Elders often did some pretty nasty shit over the course of their long lives, but diablerie was a whole different level of asshole, and she had a hard time imagining even Jacob doing that. But him just saying he'd never done it was no way a guarantee he hadn't. Fucker loved to lie, to see if she could figure him out. And right now she could not.

"So what now?" she said, stepping back and moving around the bowl to stand opposite of him again. The bowl was easier to look at than the hanging body.

Jacob frowned at her, and motioned for her to return. Sighing, she walked back over to stand beside him, until he sat down by the huge bowl, and she did as well. She did not like where this was going.

"You need to understand something, Beatrice Damor. If you want to learn crúac rituals, if you want a peek at what it's like to call upon things beyond your understanding, you're going to have to suffer."

"Suffer?"

He gestured to the empty bowl. In the dark and hard to see, there were some objects lying in its base, and now that she was sitting by the bowl, she took a moment to squint and peer at them. More knives.

"Why do you think I brought you here, to this underground cavern in an old cemetery? Here, we may pursue these dark arts, and the screams will remain within these walls."

"... screams?"

The robed man leaned into the bowl, and withdrew one of the blades. Blade was a strong word for it, more like rock that'd been chipped into something sharp, and then tied to a wooden grip of sorts with string.

"The Circle of the Crone is many things. Some of us worship the gods of the earth. Some of us chant and dance naked in the moonlight to celebrate the blood of the cosmos. Some of us speak to spirits, or the dead, and offer our blood in communication or worship. But there's one thing you need to know, one similarity between all witches: the beast in your guts is going to come out."

"I don't—"

"You may not know why you're interested in this stuff, but I do. It's because the beast inside you is a little closer to the surface than most Kindred. In this pussy town, everyone here is whipped. Fucking. Whipped. By that Prince, and the Invictus council, and even Garry."

"... you mean we're all pussy whipped because we like peace? Christ Jacob, I'm not the violence lover you think I am."

"Didn't say violence. That night I showed up in your precious catacombs to talk, you didn't shy away or anything. Like a fucking badger, you snarled and barked." He put an arm around her shoulder, and gave her one of those buddy hugs humans give when they're drunk. "If I asked you to rip someone in half with your bare hands, an enemy, you wouldn't have an issue."

She flinched, and looked down. Rebecca. Beatrice never thought back to the woman's death, not really, not for anything more than to smile at how satisfying it'd been.

"So I'm a little more in touch with my beast than the pussy-whipped Kindred of Dolareido. So what?" she said.

"So, that makes you a prime candidate for deeper levels of the Circle. It's why I invited you. It's why I knew you'd eventually wonder about these blood rituals. You remember the thrill of the night I put my blood on you, and bestowed upon you my power."