My Little Ventrue Pt. 05 Ch. 06

"I thought we fueled the rituals with vitae?" She said, bite in her voice as she pushed past Jacob. Took guts to push around the elder, but at this point Jen was familiar enough with the man to know he enjoyed it when people got snippy with him, pushed back. More familiar than Triss really, but unlike Triss, Jen's punches were harmless.

"We do, usually. But fresh blood can be used in different rituals, in different ways. And besides, we need the body. Gonna introduce you to an old friend."

Triss jumped over to Jacob, and reached out with her free hand to pull down on his robe to get him to walk beside her, lean in to her so she could whisper as they moved.

"The fuck, you're going to summon that thing again?"

"I am."

"Why?"

"Because he's my friend. He'll want to meet Jennifer, and—"

"Black Blood? That... that thing, that possessed the corpse first time you sent me into this mess? That thing is a god damn fucking... thing! You seriously consider it a friend?"

"Ha! Sent you? You volunteered. And besides," he draped his arm over her shoulder, and onto her other shoulder where the kine lay, "Black Blood's eager to get to know you better. I trust him, he's my friend, like I told you."

"... better? It"—and it was an it, according to the sheriff—"is a fucking... spirit. An actual, real, fucking nasty son of a bitch spirit, Jacob. The fuck sort of game are you playing at here?"

"Whatever do you mean, sweet Beatrice?" Chuckling, Jacob walked up to the mausoleum, and opened the stairway down into their lovely little slice of hell. He put a little distance between them so she had to speak up to keep the conversation going, meaning he didn't want her to whisper anymore.

"I mean, that thing... that thing scared the fucking shit out of me last time, Jacob. You can't be—"

"I can be friends with whoever I want, Mom." Bastard laughed, a little louder, as he pulled out his LED lantern, and started down the stairs.

They never talked about Black Blood. Jacob avoided the topic the few times she tried to bring it up, or kept his answers short and vague, like that time they were visiting Azamel. Figures, that Jacob wouldn't reveal more details about the alien entity that had possessed a corpse, and joined in torturing her that first night. She shivered as her mind delighted her with unfortunately vivid memories of the corpse staring down at her, laughing, as she, it, stabbed her in the stomach, and let Jacob explain the whole technique of learning a ritual. Empty the mind, let the beast through, and find your fucking zen.

They weren't doing that tonight, no plans to teach her more crúac rituals any time soon, thank god. Tonight Jacob was going to demonstrate a ritual, with Black Blood there, for whatever reason. Poor Jen, girl had no idea how deep this insanity went. Neither did Triss. And that was exciting, and terrifying.

Down into the depths and darkness. Down beneath the hundreds of dead of the cemetery. Down into the Earth where the light couldn't penetrate. Down into Jacob's home away from home. Triss adjusted the unconscious woman on her shoulder, and followed the robed man into the black, lit only by his lantern. Jen stayed close, and squinted her eyes to try and see ahead of them. Last time the sheriff had been waiting for them, and that had been scary in its own right.

"... you got another hole in the ground like this somewhere?" Triss said.

"Of course."

"Yeah, that makes sense. If Daniel knows where this place is, and I assume so does the Prince, you... probably have some place that they don't know about." To do your more heinous, dangerous shit.

"I suggest you girls do the same. Find a place no one knows about, or make one. It might take a few decades, but with diligence and determination, you can have your very own underground hole in the wall. Collect your favorite possessions. Bring your enemies so you can torture them safely, without fear of interference. Learn to play the drums without bothering your neighbors."

Triss could almost hear Jen roll her eyes.

Slowly, they approached the bowl. It didn't take long for the bowl to mean something new to Triss, after the few times she'd seen it. Every time, it was pain. Every time, it was screams. Even now, she ducked her head and looked around at the walls of stone, sure she could hear the sounds of people dying. Her voice was mixed in there somewhere, had to be, still echoing from those nights of torture.

She set the kine down beside the bowl, and she squatted down next to them. Here, it was plain to see the dark skeletons holding up the bowl, the great weight on their bodies, crushing them, destroying them. She almost wanted to ask if Jacob had carved them, or sculpted them or whatever. Hard to tell what the material was, old as it was. Smooth stone, or old metal. Could you make something like this out of metal, back in the old days? Was it from the old days? Lot of questions, and she wasn't sure if she'd ever ask them.

Nah, she would eventually. It'd take time though.

Jacob picked the sacrifice up, and jumped into the bowl. Up and up, he raised her until he got her hands over the hook that dangled above, and let it catch the rope holding the kine's wrists. Dangling. Meat on a hook.

"Back in the days of yore, Kindred, or everyone really, thought that without pain, a sacrifice was meaningless. Burn the witch? She had to be awake for it, otherwise what was the point? Hang the criminal. Make sure they squirmed. Wasn't until the late 1800s they came up with humane neck snapping hangings. Heh."

"So I guess we're civilized, because we're doing this with drugs? Keeping them under?" Jen circled the bowl, arms folded across her chest, and a touch of a sneer on her nose and lips. She wasn't used to killing kine, and this display was closer to hanging and gutting a deer, than any sort of way a Kindred normally killed kine.

Triss was used to it, to separating herself from the reality that she was killing something she used to be, letting out her young Nosferatu frustration and beast on humans that deserved death. She'd developed quite the reputation in her younger years, and had had Garry talk to her multiple times about her bullshit. The Masquerade was more important than her life, and if she continued to increase the body count, the sheriff would put her out for sunrise. Probably nailed to a cross too, for dramatic effect at the Prince's request. Her siring had been done without permission, after all; each day she was alive was a gift, according to Garry.

Jen's younger years, on the other hand, had been lacking in the violence department. Sleeping around was about the worst of it, which meant nothing to a Kindred. She did have a couple kills to her, the typical accidents a young Kindred might have. But Jen didn't have the animal inside her that was comfortable with killing prey; yet, according to Jacob.

"Indeed we are civilized, little lady, indeed we are." Jacob hopped off the bowl, and started toward the other side of the room, where the darkness was impenetrable. "At least, relatively. It's all relative. Everything is." He tossed the LED lantern over his shoulder as he walked, and Triss jumped for it. If it broke, they'd be fucked, and have to feel their way out of here. Fucking bastard.

Snarling, she followed him.

"The fuck are you keeping back here?" she said.

"You probably don't want to see." The old man glanced over his shoulder at her. It was getting easier to read his body language, despite the bandage over his eye sockets.

"Why would I—oh fucking god."

The lantern reach was less, in the strange dark side of the room, like there was a fog fighting it. There was no fog though, just oppressive blackness, and Jacob's wall of what the fuck. From this close, she could see he had chests, old fashioned wooden chests that you'd keep large blankets in, except in this case, it was bones. At least, one of the chests had bones sticking out of it, human bones. As she looked around, lantern raised, she noticed the other chests were partially open, one with handles sticking out, weapon handles. Knives, swords, similar. Another chest had limbs, rotting limbs. The smell hit her, and she gagged, causing the lantern to shake around in her hand as she struggled to remain standing. The smell was localized to this side of the room though, mostly. Maybe it had something to do with the weird blackness.

She raised the lantern, and tilted her head to the side. More symbols. So. Many. Symbols. Hundreds, thousands of them, many spattered with a language she'd never seen before, letters she didn't recognize. Circles and triangles, in and outside each other, and various drawings of bones, of skulls. Cow skull, bird skull, others. No human skulls though, except for one, in the center of a triangle, in the center of the wall.

On the wall were chains as well, dangling, each lined with hooks, and many of the hooks held a body part of some kind. They seemed preserved somehow, as if someone had dried them, but without them shrinking. A hand. A foot. A leg. Limbs, angled and hung in a pattern, and Triss raised the lantern higher to scan the wall. The pattern was a loose circle, and a triangle of limbs within.

The wall was bleeding. Black? She stepped in closer, beside Jacob, and reached out with her free hand to touch the onyx liquid. Cold. But, as it coated her fingertip, it faded away, dripping off of her like oil, but evaporating quickly like alcohol. This is where that alien thing came out of last time, then.

She looked at Jacob, and he looked to her, big Joker smile on his face.

"It was a long, long time, figuring out this ritual," he said. Meandering along, he ran his fingers across the stone of the wall, the chains, the body parts, and smiled as he stopped in front of one of the symbols. A painted bird skull. Probably a crow, considering Triss was wearing a crow skull around her neck.

"What's this ritual for?" Jen's voice. Triss looked over her shoulder to find her fellow neonate hugging herself, and looking the wall of death up and down. Her eyes lingered on one of the chests, and the body parts it was full of. Like a heavy blanket, the smell enveloped her too, and she gagged, taking a step back.

"You're about to find out. And, do keep this a secret, would you, Jen? The Prince knows, but as you can tell, the sheriff doesn't appreciate what I'm doing. You can only imagine the sort of dirty looks I'd get if more people knew."

"And what is that?" Jen said, gesturing to the wall. "I... I don't—"

"Words can't do it justice." Jacob chuckled a little more, opened one of the chests, and pulled out a large knife. "Come on. We get to eat!" With a slow, wandering sway, Jacob returned to the bowl, knife hand taking practice swings at the air. Like a child testing his new toy sword. "Did you know, my ladies, that I once met a Kindred, before I came to Dolareido, that didn't eat only blood, but also flesh?"

"Flesh?" Triss followed him, Jen a moment later, and the Nos looked up at her boss with a raised eyebrow. "Doesn't sound like a vampire."

"And yet they suffered all the same weaknesses. Fire, daylight. Unfortunately for them, they had an extra weakness: the need to eat fresh flesh."

That was some classic movie monster madness, by the sounds of it. "Sounds like... sounds like something different. And how the fuck do you remember something that long ago? Thought you elders didn't remember shit from that far back."

"You wound me, Beatrice! Some of us remember better than others. Some of us take the time to write down important things, and reread our journals back to ourselves, to break through the illusions torpor brings." Shrugging, Jacob gave the body a push, so she... it swayed back and forth over the bowl. "I helped her. For a while, I hunted with her, back in the old days when... when we embraced our beasts with reckless abandon, in the dark corners of the world. Even took a bite of flesh, to try it. Alas, couldn't digest it."

Jacob kept journals? What fortune would the Prince give Triss in exchange for those. What secrets, what power. Triss smirked, and looked back up to Jacob.

"What happened to her?"

"No idea. It was hundreds of years ago." And with all the grace of a shitty butcher chopping up meat with a cleaver, he ripped the woman's clothes from her body, and took a swipe at the hanging, naked flesh. The belly. Jen and Triss both jumped back, gagging, Jen choking along with it, as the woman's guts fell into the bowl. Jacob didn't let them fall out either, but made them come out, using his free hand and yanking the globs of meat free. "She fucked like a minx, though."

Both women stared on, eyes wide, jaws dropping, as Jacob emptied the woman of her insides. Drugged to high heaven, she wasn't waking up, and after this, she never would.

"Jesus, Jacob." Triss walked around, held the lantern up despite herself, and peered into the bowl. Rope and rope of intestines. Kidneys. Liver. He ripped the diaphragm open and tore out the heart and lungs. He kept yanking things out, ripping, tearing, blood gushing over his robes. He managed to avoid other juices, other things that came out of the body and its organs, but he more than embellished in getting blood on himself.

The girls said nothing. Triss couldn't say anything, and a quick peek at Jen showed the same paralysis. The fuck. The fuck fuck fuck.

Jacob, laughing, chopped off the woman's leg. A hard hack, knife carving through skin and muscle and bone with a single swipe, before it got stuck in the other leg. Jacob grabbed the removed leg before it landed, hopped down off the bowl, and smiled at the ladies as he held it over his head. He let some of the drops of blood fall onto his tongue, then held it out to them. "Quickly now, before it spoils."

Leg. Leg. He was holding a leg. As if to show off his trophy, he rolled the leg back and forth in his palms, and held it out to them. Muscle, fat, fresh dripping blood. Down deeper, and deeper, into this private pit of hell of theirs.

Oh, what the hell. She grabbed the limb, held it up by the knee, and let the blood drip onto her tongue.

This bloody display was disgusting. It was barbaric, and horrific, and... thrilling. So dark, so wrong, so bad, that it stroked a little part of her brain, somewhere, that liked being bad. Life in the palm of her hand, life in so callous and visceral a form, a limb from prey. Part of her wanted to make a comparison to a chicken or cow leg, but that didn't do it justice. A human life, even a scumbag life like this kine's, someone Triss would have gladly killed in her younger years, was still significant and special. To feel a kine die in her arms as she drank them to death, was a feeling she knew well enough to recall from memory. But this approach, dismembering, spilling all the blood everywhere, and tasting it from a limb? This wasn't feeding, this was a ritual. This was special too.

She held out the leg to Jen, and waited. Sure enough, after a few useless breaths, Jen took the leg, and did the same thing. A hunk of meat, of sacred meat, of something worthless and special, all wrapped in one.

Jacob nodded, smiled a quieter, more sincere smile, and tossed the leg into the bowl of death and pain. "Now, each of us will spill a drop of our blood onto the mess."

"Mess?" Jen, gagging some more as she leaned over the bowl, gestured to the entrails. "This was... ugh."

"Kindred these days." More laughter, always with the laughter, Jacob slipped a knife out of his robe, and sliced open his palm with all the grace of a bulldozer. "You drink human beings, you drink their blood. Never forget what they are. A soul, wrapped in guts and muscle, sinew and bone, tendons, and"— he reached into the bowl, and pulled out something wet and dripping, something that fit into his palm—"organs. A divine combination of meat and something more. And, how easily, it all slips into nothing but a bowl." After tossing back in the lump of guts, the psycho reached his other hand out over the bowl, and squeezed his palm until a thick drop of Kindred blood fell into the gory mess. Without looking, he tossed the knife Triss's way.

She snatched it out of the air, and slit her palm open as well. Long passed giving a shit about being careful or gentle about knives and flesh. She stepped in toward the bowl, forced herself to look down at the abhorrent jumble of death, and dribbled a couple drops of her blood.

Jen took the knife, and cut her palm, but with a blatant wince and hiss. Not used to pain. She would be, if she continued down this road. Sighing, she dripped some blood onto the mess as well.

"Sure you don't want to be back in the cave with your kine bedfellows, Jen?" Jacob said. "Or maybe Julias's bed?"

The Ventrue rolled her eyes, and threw Jacob the knife. Almost threw the knife at him, too, but Jen seemed to calm down at the last moment. And once disarmed, she looked down at the cut on her palm as it healed.

"You're just like Marcus. All you think about is sex," Jen said.

"You're the one sleeping with everyone in the city, not me." The eyeless bastard shrugged.

"That's not what I meant. You keep reducing people and their actions down to sex, and only sex. You don't know me, Jacob." She stomped over to him, and jammed a finger into his chest. "I like sex. That doesn't mean it's all I think about, or that I am defined by it."

The old man laughed, and gave her a poke in the sternum too. "I know. Lighten up, girl. Been working for me for what, six, seven years? You need to let your tongue fly loose more, loose as your legs." Without skipping a beat, the jackass pulled a necklace out of his robe, a string with various small animal skulls dangling from it, and started to shake them over the entrails.

Triss said nothing. Better to let these two hammer out their issues, than for her to jump in and make things worse. It was plain to see that Jacob kept the circle at arm's length, and Triss was the first one, since his original circle, to really try and break through to the man. She was an asshole though, and could match Jacob's asshole attitude easily. Jen was a calmer, more articulate, elegant sort, who didn't like to get her words dirty.

She was going to have to learn. With all the blood and guts that'd be falling on them, drowning them in no time, Jacob wouldn't hesitate to get just as visceral with his language.

Jennifer snorted, and folded her arms across her chest once more. "When's the last time you gotten between anyone's legs, old man?"

Ok, maybe she could throw an insult or two.

Jacob, laughing like fucking Santa Claus, reached into his robe again, and pulled out another necklace. This one didn't have skulls, but it did have some stones, smooth black stones, wrapped and looped in the string the necklace was made from. He dangled it over the bowl, and shook it as well.

He began to chant. A language she didn't recognize. Sounded like it came from maybe the Middle East, but she didn't know shit about languages, so maybe not. Whatever it was, it sounded melodic, and almost hypnotic. Until the silence around them joined in, with the screams of the dead.

Hell opened its gates for them.

Drip. Drop. Drip drop. Black began to ooze from the walls, heavy, thick, sliding down the crevices of the stone like molasses. Scary, black molasses. It churned and bubbled, splashed and boiled, and splattered out over the stone floor of the cave, as it crept out toward them. Like a scene from a James Bond flick, the water in the cage rising to drown them. Except, this black liquid wasn't water, and Triss stepped away from it as it came closer, and closer.

Jacob did no such thing. With a big smile on his asshole face, the eyeless Nosferatu squatted down, and let the couple inches of heavy obsidian liquid roll across the bottom of his robes. He ran a finger through it too, scooping it around and around like a child playing with his pudding. Heavy and sticky, the strange liquid coated his fingers, and he laughed as he stood up to let it drip off.