My Little Ventrue Pt. 05 Ch. 07

"You see, Eric Tanverson, the sort of message we're gonna send is 'fuck you, I won't do what you tell me.'" Laughing, thinking his RATM reference was genius, Pitt paced around in front of him, and kicked him in the knee again. Eric got some sound out through his broken nose, and some gargled splattering of blood running over goon one's hand. Bastard didn't blink. "We got plans, Eric. Mr. Long is going to push those shit wipes out, and we're going to take over this city. Xnomina? Fuck them."

The idiot was telling him a lot of stuff. Either he loved to monologue, or he knew Eric wasn't going to survive this encounter. Or both, probably both.

Eric started panting, eyes snapping around. Each goon was a big threat, but the Pitt fucker wasn't, just a maggot with a mouth waiting to be torn apart. He had to kill them first, break them apart, tear into them, rip and tear and shred. But he couldn't. Fucking christ, he couldn't. He tried, pulled on his arms, tried to break them free, but their grips were absolute and their weights bigger than his.

"And since that bitch Jessy has her eyes on you, what a perfect place to leave a message." Chuckling, Pitt pulled out a knife, and twirled it around in his hand.

A door at the end of the hall opened. A woman came out, flab hanging off her arms, gut hanging out from her t-shirt and between her stained bathrobe, cigarette between her fingers. Everyone looked at her. She looked at them, eyes wide, flicking between everyone a hundred feet from her.

She backed away, and slammed the door. No chance in hell she was going to call for help, call 911, the police, nothing, not now after the criminals saw her face. Had to protect herself of course, not do anything to attract attention from the wrong sort of crowd. God, he fucking hated this place.

Knife. The fucker had a knife. And from the look in the stupid little man's eyes, it seemed like he was going to use the knife on Eric, probably with intent to kill. Message, he was a message for Xnomina that Terra Den wasn't going to get bossed around anymore. They probably had no fucking idea about Xnomina's true nature, that they were going up against vampires. Idiots, fucking idiots.

The fucking idiots were going to kill him.

"Any last words, Tanverson?" The short stack of meat said, standing a foot from him, knife up and picking at his nails.

Now or never. Eric kicked ou—goon three caught the foot with his own, a preemptive trip, and goon two kicked him in the bad knee, causing Eric's weight to give out from underneath him. The two assholes holding him let him fall to his knees, including the bad one, and Eric screamed into the hand of goon fucking-one as his weight crunched against the kneecap.

"Now now, that's not a word, Tanverson." Pitt winked at him, and came in closer, taller than Eric now. To be looked down on by this tiny, pathetic, weak stack of flabby meat, was infuriating.

Eric forced himself to breathe harder, and faster, forced air into his lungs as his felt his blood begin to boil. He shivered, eyes snapping around, heart beating into a frenzy in his chest until it was a machine gun in his ears. He started to struggle, harder, hard enough to feel his muscles strain to pain, hard enough he could feel his bones ready to break. One time, in a match, he'd blocked an opponent's kick with his shin, and the impact had nearly broken the bone; it did break the opponent's. The sickening texture of breaking bone, and the feel of it, was a scar on his mind. He could feel his bones approaching that point, going too far.

But something in him didn't care. Bubbling, groaning, rising to a roar in his mind, between the eyes. It told him to keep fighting, to push against these idiots, these fools, this prey that was stupid enough to challenge him in his territory. His! It was his territory, and they were violating it. It was his life, and they were threatening it.

Move, fight, rip and tear and shred. Bite them! Go for the neck! The stomach! Soft spots, kill spots, the belly and throat. Survival of the fittest, the strong eat the weak, the strong kill the weak, the strong build their futures on the bones of the weak.

The knife came closer. The fucker's smirking, shithole face came closer.

Spill their guts.

Break their bones.

Bite into their lives, and end them. Bite into them! Bite into them! Bite!

He struggled, panic mixing with anger, until bile rose in his throat, burning his esophagus. Closer, cold metal held by a cold, idiot prey. Eric was the wounded predator, and this prey was taking advantage of it, rats attacking the sickly, injured cat. A sickly, injured cat deserved such a fate if it couldn't defend itself, but Eric was not a sickly, injured, fucking cat.

Oh god, Kat.

Oh... god... Dad.

Pain, pain he could not imagine, started up from his stomach. The tall, muscly thing in front of him holding his jaw did not let him look down, and Eric wasn't sure he wanted to. Metal, cold and cruel, eased its way through his shirt, his skin, his stomach, and into the things inside. Soft, belly, no bones to protect the contents.

He was going to die, in this most pathetic way. The most possibly pathetic way he could imagine.

Boom.

Boom.

Time slowed down. Somewhere, in the back of his mind, he dug up, through the fog of rage and hunger, the memory of a movie he once saw. It said time slows down when you're about to die. Life flashes before your eyes. But all Eric was seeing in his eyes, was misery, and a short, stupid stack of meat that needed to die. The moving pictures had been right about the slowing down though; his pulse was like a whale's, thundering in his skull, slow, and overwhelming.

Boom.

Boom.

His eyes looked up at the big prey still holding his jaw. This one met his gaze, but Eric could see the meat was too stupid to appreciate what was happening, that he was committing murder. Eric tried to look to the others, but they'd pulled their heads back, and watched from above, beyond Eric's line of sight. No stomach for the kill.

"Eric..." The small meat's voice was slow, almost warped, as Eric's eyes snapped to and fro.

Boom.

Boom.

"You're... going... to... die... as... a... message."

Slower, slower. Time pulsed in his skull, joining his heart, joining the life-ending headache that worked down through his spine. There was a piece of something in his gut. Something hard. What was the word? Metal? Something, something sharp. A claw. This meat's claw. This meat that didn't have his own claws, had to use something hard from the ground, something it tore up from the ground, and cut into him with.

Stupid, idiot meat. Meat was only good for one purpose. And this meat, the stinking pile of meat didn't have claws, or fangs.

This wolf did.

Boom.

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~~Julias~~

It was one thing after another in Dolareido these days.

Julias stared around at the mess, at the red that coated the walls, the curtains, the floor, the couch, the boxes, and sighed. What in the ever living fuck.

He wandered around, inching his way through the shitty apartment. The blood coated the walls in streaks, like someone had been finger painting in some places, or trying to do a Pollock. Randomness, and yet not, a moment of action given form. Someone had done something, something visceral, and it'd led to the deadly paintings of blood around him.

The fact it was a shitty apartment kind of ruined the artistry though. In a nicer place, a house or some such, it would have been oddly beautiful. Might have made for a good painting in his old apartment. But here, the cheap carpet embraced the blood to the point he had to avoid the puddles.

A meow drew him into the kitchen. He raised a brow, and entered into the tiny thing, to look down at a cat on the counter.

"... the hell?"

"Eric's cat. Kat," Jessy said. She was in the kitchen with the creature, and sighing as she stroked the small animal's cheek. "Said she was a dumbass. Considering she's still here, after this fucking insanity, and has zero issue with strangers? Yeah, total dumbass."

"Ferret, trapped in a cat's body."

"Excuse me?" She raised a brow at him, and scratched the cat behind the ears. Audible purrs followed.

"Never seen a ferret before?"

"Cat snakes?"

"... um, sure. I owned some, in my early experiments with animalism. Give them five minutes around humans, and they become sociable with them for the rest of their lives. Zero survival instincts." Cute as buttons, though. There were few animals that personified playfulness and obliviousness quite like a ferret.

Jessy smiled, for a moment, but he didn't manage to get a laugh out of her. She looked sad. That was surprising, considering how the girl never looked sad. Angry, sure. Happy, often. Sad? Never. But her eyes were downtrodden, and her shoulders hung heavy as she slipped past Julias and back into the crime scene. He followed after her, but made a glance back at Kat the cat. The animal sat there on the counter top, and did nothing.

Back through the apartment, small as it was. The knocked over boxes were almost tragic, with how few things were in them, some clothes fallen out of them and scattered about onto the soaked crimson carpet. This Eric fellow must have been living a sparse life.

"Any signs of struggle in the bedroom?" he said.

"No, everything is localized to the living room and the front door."

"Any idea what happened?"

"Sort of." Jessy waved a hand over. A couple of ghouls were walking around, taking pictures while also preparing cleaning supplies. One of them was Jessy's. The man nodded to Julias, almost a bow, and Julias made eye contact with him, enough to accept the gesture, ghoul to vampire.

"What have you got?"

"Arm," Jessy said.

"Arm?"

"Arm." She squatted down, and pointed to the corner of the apartment. Behind one of the blood-splattered boxes, was an arm, sleeve wrapped around it and half-soaked red. The arm wasn't cut off, and Julias doubted it could have been shot off, despite all the bullet holes and casings lying around. No explosives had been set off either. But arms didn't magically fall off, someone had to have removed it from someone else.

Someone must have torn the arm off.

"It's not Eric's arm," she said. "I... oh shit." Waddling forward, still in a squat position, she reached out, and pushed aside some more boxes, ones that had been sitting underneath the most bloody wall.

Body parts.

"... Pitt, you fucking little sack of garbage." She reached out, and yanked out a head from the pile. His dead gaze stared up at them, mouth open, fear etched into his paralyzed muscles. It would have been more normal to see such a head on a pike. "See this fucker? This is Pitt, works for Montel."

"Long's man?"

"Yep." She stared at the head, glaring, grimacing, lip curled into a sneer as a tiny growl escaped her. "Always wanted to kill this fucker, but it'd be juvenile of me. No reason to make things harder with Terra Den either."

"Why's he here?"

"Eric had a debt with Montel. I told Long to drop it."

"A large debt?"

"Nope. Pennies. I'm guessing Montel overstepped, or Long was looking to piss us off on purpose." Shrugging, she pulled the boxes further away from the wall, exposing more body parts. Some more heads, two of them missing significant chunks of their skull. More arms, more legs, many again having been torn or otherwise missing too many pieces to complete the limb.

The smell wasn't too bad yet. Scene couldn't have been more than six hours ago. Happened before Jack called him about the ritual then.

"How'd you know to come here so quickly?" he said.

"Ganders called me. Said Eric didn't show up for work."

"He called you?"

"He knows I hang out with Eric at the club sometimes. And he knows that Eric knows about Kindred, so he knows Eric wouldn't just randomly take a sick day with him under our thumb, especially not without telling him." She shrugged, but every time she said the man's name, her shoulders slumped a little more, and her head fell down a little more. Poor girl probably didn't realize it, or what it meant.

But, not his place to pry into something like that.

"Anything here that could be him?" he said, gesturing to the pile of body parts. The fuck was in the Dolareido air lately, that could cause these sorts of scenes? Jack's report about the ritual was barbaric and brutal enough, but now it was Julias standing before a disgusting sight, not Jack.

"Nah. I'm seeing... well, I mean I guess I'm seeing... three?" She got up, moved over to a different corner, and pushed aside some more boxes. "Make that four bodies. Missing a lot of meat though, lot... ugh, ok, well, the guts are here." Gagging, she stepped back, and brushed her fingers off on her jeans. "And... there... and over there..."

The blood on the walls that surrounded the apartment, was because someone had flung the limbs, the torsos with opened bellies too, into the walls like water balloons. Splat. That explained the patterns.

"Not enough mass," he said, stepping around Jessy's ghoul, and pointing to the body parts. Another box here, another box there — most of them were mostly empty, poor guy owned almost nothing — pushed aside revealed more shreds of flesh. A hand with a ring. A shoe, quality, with the attached foot and leg coming halfway up the shin. The bones were broken, cracked like twigs.

"So many claw marks." Jessy gestured to one of the legs, where another ghoul was taking a picture. "This is nothing like that ritual site Jack found. That was planned, and meticulous. This is chaos incarnate."

Two clean ups in one night was unheard of, and they were of polar opposite nature too. Chaos didn't begin to describe it.

"Gangrel gone on a frenzy, perhaps?" He walked over to the front door again, and looked down the hall. The walls were damaged, and now that Jessy said the word 'claw', he had no choice but to frame everything in that mind. The trio of lines down the wall, all the way down the hallway? Claw marks. Enormous claw marks. Something had been dragging their claws against the wall as they moved.

"Maybe. We could do that, make some claws big enough for that. Doesn't seem Gangrel style though." She followed him out into the hallway, where two more ghouls, and Vivienne Maiorie were standing.

"This... is pretty bad," Vivi called out from the room at the end of the hallway. "Old woman in here, scared senseless. Alive though."

Nodding, Julias looked down as he walked. There was some blood splatter in the hall, but not where Julias wanted it, on the feet. A bloody footprint would have been great, something he could use to identify. Instead, there were various puncture marks along the shitty ceramic tile. Weird patterns, weird scratches.

No, not so weird, not if he let himself consider the possibility.

"Someone tall made these claw marks?" he said, looking over his shoulder to Jessy as he walked to the other apartment.

"Someone, something, yeah."

"Someone or something that can rip apart people like paper."

"... I see where you're going, Julias." She jogged up to him, shaking her head. "No chance in hell one of Avery's people did this. I mean, why the fuck would they? The hell reason would they have to be here?"

"Mister Mire may be correct." Vivi came forward, and offered him a bow. Natasha's childe, a meek and shy girl, offered her best smile, and most confident stance. Not very. "If you look here, you'll see the weird scratches in the floor are mostly in line with each other, and there are four of them at a time, the two in the center slightly ahead of the others."

"Claw marks on the feet?" Jessy got down beside one of the long stretches of slashed tile, and looked back over her shoulder. "The fuck... we got any surveillance on this building?"

"Only the entrance to the building, outside." Nodding as she looked down, Vivienne walked up to Jessy and offered her her phone. On the screen was a camera feed, and Julias stepped in to look over the Gangrel's shoulder to watch.

A shitty angle, providing little detail. Blurs from cars driving by, and a long distance, meant the footage wouldn't be providing much.

But the three of them gasped when the front door of the building smashed open, and a blur came out. Well, that explained the front door of the building being busted open and sent into the street. It didn't explain the blur though, a smudge darting down the alley, and into the darkness. A large blur.

"... can you enhance this at all?" Jessy said.

Vivi raised a brow at her. No, technology couldn't do that, it couldn't fabricate accuracy from nothing; or at least, not technology that was being circulated yet, or available to the Invictus. Julias tried to hide his smirk, but he could see Vivi struggle on how to tell her superior that she watched too much TV, and the zoom in and enhance thing was bullshit.

"Um, no, sir. That technology is still in the works."

"Damn." She threw up her hands, and leaned in closer, as if a few more inches gained on the blurs would help identify. "This... this blur doesn't look like the rest of the blurry shit though. This is extra blurry. Like it's warped."

"... didn't we have reports that pictures of the Uratha, when Simon visited, were warped?" Julias stepped away from the two, and walked down the hall into the where the claw marks continued. They went down the stairs and out the door as well, a mix of slashes and cuts that, now in the new context, did indeed look like the marks a huge wolf might leave behind. He started down the hallway, away from Eric's apartment, and toward the door at the end of the hall that was forced open. "I remember cameras were new technology at the time. We chalked it up to bad tech. But, if this is something that Uratha lunacy can do..."

"Similar to Kindred, in a way... except for this." Vivi followed after him, and cut by him. Surprising, but she had the look of someone determined on her face, lost in her moment of realization.

She guided him into the apartment ahead. No blood except for some around the claw marks. The door had been kicked in hard enough that it came off the hinges, and slammed into the wall of the small home. And there, a raggedy woman sat in a chair, hands on her temples, rocking back and forth.

"I... I... my door is gone... I... I..."

Julias looked back to Jessy, but after settling in the room, she raised a brow at the woman, and shrugged. "Looks pretty loony to me," he said. Terrible, terrible way to describe it, but it was accurate enough. Her eyes were all over the place, or staring ahead into nothing, as she cradled her skull like it might fall off if she didn't. "What did you see?" He squatted down in front of her, and waited.

"A... b-blur... blur... blur? It... the bad men, they came and... they were hurting him, and... blur... and... blood... and... screams and yelling."

He raised a brow and looked at Vivi. "Bad men?"

"She means Pitt, and his goons," Jessy said. "Fucker was a slimy piece of shit, and you could tell just by looking at him." Jessy moved in front of the kine, and waved a hand in front of her eyes. No reaction. "Yeap, loony. What a fucking stereotype."

It was a silly stereotype. The vampire stereotype was that they didn't appear in mirrors, or on film, which was absurd. They appeared, but in pictures or footage, the faces were always a touch blurry, or never met the lens straight on. The fact this woman was actually confused, and dazed, almost to the point of appearing like a lunatic for the Uratha sighting, was so on-the-nose as to almost be drôle. The fact the footage of the werewolf was blurry, blatantly blurry, was just as aggressive and obvious as Uratha were in general.

Maybe Jack was right. He was hard on Azamel, threatening her and her hole in the ground, but he was kind to the Uratha, asking for their help and giving them their space, when the evidence was here in front of him that maybe the Uratha were a bigger issue. He hadn't seen damage like this since a young Gangrel had gone frenzy in their apartment building, and had killed their neighbor. A blood bath, and a lot of work for the Invictus to clean up, and hide from the media.