My Little Ventrue Pt. 06 Ch. 10

"Julias got lucky, very early on."

Jack jerked his head toward the door. His sire stood there, hand in pocket while the other eased the door open silently. With quiet steps, Julias leaned back against the door, closing it, and offered Jack a small smile.

"Julias?"

"Not long after I was embraced, I visited my wife. We started to argue, and I hit her. Not a slap, either. I hit her hard enough to nearly break bone. Had to take her to the hospital. I vanished that night, and never saw her again."

Jack stared at the man, and gulped. "You?"

"Me."

"Hit your wife."

"Yeap."

"... why?"

"All these years, I assumed it was because I was a colossal asshole. And I'm sure that was part of it. But, after seeing what became of Viktor, and seeing... what's happening to you, I'm starting to wonder if our bloodline really is cursed." Julias pulled up a chair, and sat across from him, looking at him over his mother.

"Cursed..."

"Maybe cursed is the wrong word. Viktor was strong, always was. So was I. I thought Viktor returned from his long torpor twisted, but... I wouldn't be surprised if the man had been a horrible, twisted soul before, and just did a better job hiding it before his torpor. And me, I felt that anger in me when I hit my wife, how it seared my soul, and I... I pushed every bit of that anger deep down into my guts. Hated myself, for a century, until I met a girl like Triss."

Jack stared at him for a while, but laughed once the cliché reality of his words sank in.

"For the love of a woman, right?"

"Exactly."

Jack laughed again, and pat his arm on his mom's shoulder as he smiled at Julias. "I don't have much context. First relationship of my life is proving to be a keeper."

"First relationship I've had in forever is proving to be a keeper, too."

"Sometimes I wonder about marriage. A paper contract seems so... meaningless, compared to... well, everything about our lives."

"Yeah, it does. But fuck me, I was going to ask her anyway, Jack."

That was a bit surprising. "Think Triss'll say yes?"

He nodded, and offered him a small grin. "Jen and I have been trading secrets, with Triss as a spectator. Personal stuff. I'm going to use the fifth and final secret as a marriage proposal."

"Sounds disgustingly romantic."

"Very. Triss will hate it, and love it."

Jack smiled at the man. To know Julias had struggled with extreme rage was comforting, in a way. If the great and mighty, and sorrowful Julias, could quell his rage, maybe Jack could, too. Then again, Julias hadn't gone through the same sort of pain Jack had. His Hell had been different.

The two chuckled for a little while, before they both looked back to Samantha.

"I'd sire her, Jack, if you asked."

"I can't ask that."

"I can handle it."

"Maybe." Maybe not. If Julias did have a Beast as fucked up, twisted, and angry as Jack's, siring another childe so soon could bring it to the surface. "I don't want to put that on you."

"You could sire her, but... no, it'd be a bad idea."

"Agreed."

Sighing, Julias looked up at the machine showing her vitals. "Natasha wrestled with this."

"... she did?" He hadn't thought about that.

"Yeah. Her mother died of illness, brought on by her extreme depression over her daughter's disappearance. Not long after, her father killed himself."

"I... I don't understand. Why didn't she embrace them, or ask someone to?"

"Many reasons. She didn't have the same friends you did, or clout. And at the time, embracing was off limits except by special circumstance." The man sighed, and leaned in toward Jack, over his mother's waist. "And, even if she could have, she'd have hesitated."

"Kindred life can be rough."

"Yes, it can. Natasha's life in the Ordo Dracul terrified her. She left, joined the Invictus, and lived inside numbers and books as she coped with how scary her new life was. I'm not exactly friends with the sheriff, but the few times I saw Daniel during those first few years after her embrace, he looked... especially stone-like. I didn't know why at the time, since his embracing a childe was a secret."

"And getting hit by that fear is a very real possibility with Mom."

"Yes, it is."

"But it's better than her dying."

"Is it?"

Jack glared at his sire, and leaned in as well, only a foot remaining between their faces. "You think it'd be better if she died?"

"That's not what I said. I can't make this decision for you. Personally, being Kindred has been a roller coaster of ups and downs, with greater highs and lows than I could get when alive. But your mom is going to be starting from a very, very low low. It could ruin her. It could save her, give her a new lease on a broken life." The man didn't pull away, staying close, and matching Jack's gaze.

They stared at each other for a little while, in the eyes, without blinking. No malice or frustration. Julias wanted Jack to see what was going on in his mind without saying it, and Jack did his best to see.

Give her a chance, Jack.

"... I... I think I'll ask someone to sire her."

Julias smiled at him, offered a quick wink, and leaned back in his chair. "Whatever happens, she'll get the best welcome possible. I mean come on, her kid's one of the Right Hands of the Invictus, and a prodigy. She'll be treated with respect."

Prodigy, heh. Julias knew how to inflate his ego, that was for sure.

"Except she won't be of our bloodline. She'll be... someone else's."

"Yeah, she will." Instead of the frown Jack expected, Julias's smile remained. It was a good thing she wasn't of their bloodline, if this insidious Beast in their guts was genuine. It'd be years before Jack was in a position to sire, and Julias probably wouldn't want to for years, or decades. Plenty of time for them to figure out if this problem was fixable, manageable, or ignorable.

"Julias, I... I just wanted you to know, for all the shit that keeps coming my way, our way, I don't regret what happened."

"You don't think it'd have been better if I could have sired you on your couch, after a conversation and some preparation?"

"Heh, maybe if you got me drunk, first. But I see what you mean. Siring me while I was bleeding to death must have been a tough decision."

"You're making the same decision as we speak."

"I... I guess I am." And it was a damn tough one. "And if I knew then what I know now, I would have wanted you to embrace me." He'd never have met Antoinette if Julias hadn't.

The two of them nodded and leaned back in their chairs, each folding their arms across their chests and suits. Decision made, then.

"I assume you're going to ask Antoinette?"

Ok, decision part A made, part B pending.

"I think so. But imagining Mom with a Daeva's... quirks, is difficult. She's an airhead."

"An airhead, or maybe she just doesn't overthink everything. She lets the small things roll off, and focuses on the big things. Maybe she lets her emotions guide her a little more than she should, but then, being logical isn't always a good thing. Humans and vampires alike have this nasty requirement of needing to listen to their emotions in order to be happy, Jack, and a silly airhead has figured that out intuitively. In a way, they're a genius."

They both chuckled. It was half true, and they knew it.

"I wonder about Damien," Jack said. "Fiona reminds me of Mom. I wonder if she'll help put a dent in Damien's mind. Dude has a wall the size of Everest between him and the joy literally throwing itself at him."

"Damien and the sheriff are similar. No one's cracked Daniel's shell, except for Natasha, and even then it's only a little. I have no idea if Fiona will be able to get through Damien's thick skull, considering he's had half a century to build it."

"Half a century. God damn. Really makes all my whining sound so juvenile."

Julias shook his head, sighing. "No, it doesn't. The burden you're carrying is unusual, Jack. I trust you to carry it, but don't underestimate its weight."

Nodding, Jack reached out, and stroked his mom's forehead. "I'm... excited, to talk to her again. Fucking terrified of telling her Mary's dead, but excited to show her I'm alive. Hell, I'm even excited to tell her she gets to live for forever now. Excited and so damn terrified."

"I look forward to speaking to her again, as well. And, Antoinette will get to speak to the mother of her lover."

Well, shit. Jack hadn't even thought about that. Was that a good thing, or a bad thing? She'd tell Antoinette about how dirty he used to let his room get, or that one time when he was a boy and he had food poisoning and—yeah, bad thing, all bad.

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~~Damien~~

They sat there for a while, and listened to distant echoes of combat. Matthew's roars, and the crack of gunfire, were far enough Damien had to assume they were a near mile off. By the time the sound reached them, it was warped and a shell of its former self, which gave the three vampires and monster enough quiet to sit, recover, and chat. Chatting was, perhaps, the wrong word. Groaning was a better one.

"I am so sore," Vicky said.

Damien grumbled and looked her way. He was sitting, but only because Fiona had managed to drag him over to the tunnel wall, a good fifty feet away from the crumbled ceiling. Above where the trap had been set, was mangled earth, steel bars, and shattered concrete, threatening to fall at the edges of the hole. Fiona had spent some time hooking webbing to the hole, but without supporting arches or pillars, it was a band-aid at best, not safe to stay under.

Vicky was right to complain, he supposed. She wasn't right to keep glaring at him.

"You pushed me on top of Parker."

"I made a tactical decision. You had the best chance of surviving being crushed, compared to Parker." He gestured with his still working arm to the Daeva beside her. "Unless you would have preferred Parker be crushed."

"I, for one, am happy for Mister Burksen's valiant, and heroic efforts to save my life." Parker nodded, as if a king bestowing praise to his knight.

"You would be." Vicky gestured to her ripped suit, and the many places where concrete had torn through her skin. Like all Kindred, her insides were dry and withered, a corpse, but as a seasoned Ventrue with developed Resilience, fatal damage had been resisted. Dark, thick Kindred blood peeked out from her wounds only long enough to seal it over with hardened, dry skin, before it began healing the wound proper from the inside.

He was envious. His ankle still wasn't functional, but at least he wasn't in utter agony anymore. Only extreme agony.

He lifted his broken hand, and rotated it. Familiar white fire danced up the ruined limb, and blotted out his mind, until he let the useless limb go limp on the tunnel floor once again. Don't move, just focus on healing. If the hunters came back, or worse, new hunters attacked them from the other side, Damien wouldn't be able to do shit.

Vicky and Parker were capable of walking now, but only barely. Parker's injuries weren't as bad as Vicky's, but, like Damien, he simply wasn't resilient enough to manage thousands of pounds of rubble falling on his body, even if most of it hit the Ventrue on top of him. And Vicky had been extraordinarily lucky, dealing with less debris than Damien had. Apparently, the worst of it had fallen on Damien, as if someone was punishing him for trying to be heroic. Divine comedy.

Fiona was wounded, but nothing more than scrapes and bruises. Her leg was bleeding, and it wasn't healing with the gusto of an Uratha. And it smelled like blood. Damien, Vicky, and Parker all glanced at the girl's wound, and Fiona, bless her soul, was oblivious to everyone's gaze. She sat beside Damien, pat his leg in a place where it wasn't cut open, and smiled at him.

"Damien was fast! Never seen a laddie move so fast," she said.

"He was an assassin," Parker said. "Comes with the job description."

"Assassin? Ah, yer talking about that... Lucas business."

Damien glared at the man. He'd yet to tell Fiona about the specifics of his time with Lucas, of the darker parts of it, and it was not a conversation to be having in the current circumstance.

Vicky laughed. "Parker is only envious. His strength is considerable, and he uses Majesty to seduce kine regularly. But he is slow, for a Daeva."

Parker rolled his eyes, but didn't deny it. If anything, the man smiled, ran a finger through his shoulder-length blonde hair, and gave Vicky a small shove of the shoulder. Friendship. Damien watched, and sure enough, Vicky didn't snarl or growl or frown like an annoyed person might. Rather, she half grinned, half smirked, and returned it. Perhaps there was more to their relationship than simple partners in business. It was endearing, a little.

"Fiona," Damien said, "what environment do you need, to be able to get back to your lair?"

"A dark tunnel works, to gie to my chamber in the jungle. Some bars and clubs could take us to the blood Dolareido chamber. And—"

Vicky raised a hand. "Blood Dolareido?"

"One of the nightmares." Damien wanted to continue, explain, but he thought better of it. If Fiona wanted to go into more detail, she could, but she'd already shared many details of her life with the Kindred, and details of how Begotten worked in general. She was too trusting. "If we need a dark tunnel to travel into your jungle lair, we could arrange it, knock out some lights."

"Ye dinnae need to do that. There's lots of tunnels down 'ere that dinnae have light."

"I'm less concerned about being helpful, Fiona, and more concerned about having another escape avenue, if hunters rush us tonight. We're in no shape to defend ourselves, especially since our front liner ran off." And, from the stories he'd heard, a werewolf on the rampage was not something any of them wanted to be near.

"Oh, I gie it." She tapped a finger to her chin as she looked up, thinking. "I—"

Everyone snapped their heads down the tunnel as footsteps managed to overcome the sound of their hushed voices. The vampires brought up their guns, and Fiona got up, ready to do whatever it is she'd do in a gunfight. But as the footsteps grew louder and closer, Damien sighed and waved a dismissing hand.

"Matthew," Damien said, loud enough the others knew they were in the clear. "Catch any of them?"

"No." Groaning, much like the Kindred, Matthew stepped around the distant curve of the tunnel, and came their way. He looked like hell. The four of them each offered their own small gasps or frowns as the big guy came into view, their eyes roaming the trailing streaks of blood that coated him.

Like gasoline on a bonfire, the hunger in Damien's stomach exploded, and he stared, wide-eyed, at the copious amount of blood on the man's body. Some of it was still dripping. He didn't have any holes in his clothes, but the clothes vanished during the transformation, meaning he'd been torn up in his werewolf form then.

Matt managed to reach them, before he groaned louder, and sat down on some rubble a few feet away. Sitting became slouch, and he slid down until his butt was on the dirty floor, with his back to the debris. Exhausted, panting, Matt let his head roll back and dangle.

"Ye awright?" Fiona said.

"I'll live. Fucking wiped, though. Some silver hit me, and so did a few dozen bullets besides. And some grenades."

Parker whistled. "Don't forget getting crushed."

The Uratha laughed before he nodded toward Damien. "You look like you got the worst of it. Think you'll heal?"

"I need time, and blood." He put his pistol away, and used the one good hand to gesture to his ankle. "I can heal enough to move, but that's it." And the longer he went, the more he could feel the hunger grow. It wanted out. It wanted to defend itself, repair, get ready for the hunt, and most of all, it wanted to jump Matthew and drink the man's life essence until he was a dry husk.

"I'd help you out," he said, "but I'm fucking wiped, dizzy, low on blood and in desperate need of RNR."

Sighing, he nodded, as did his fellow vampires. They were hungry too, no doubt, but they'd suffered neither the damage nor had they exerted themselves in that moment like Damien had. They were hungry, but he was growing voracious.

He bit down, clenched his jaw, and nodded. "Are we safe?"

"I think so. I chased them to the upper level of the tunnels, and they got out through a manhole. Don't think they were expecting to run into a Rahu down here."

"Rahu?" Vicky said.

"One of the Uratha auspices." Matthew made a vague, weak attempt at flexing, but he barely managed to lift his arms. They dropped, thudding against his legs and the rubble. "Linebackers. Takes a lot to bring me down."

Parker laughed, and choked on a following cough. "Like a host of bullets, knives, grenades, and silver."

"Ok, so maybe they were expecting Uratha, but they didn't bring enough manpower to take me in a straight fight. They probably expected the rubble to take us out."

"It nearly did!" Fiona said, throwing up her hands.

"Yeah, I guess it nearly did," Matt said, a small smile sneaking onto his lips as he looked at Damien. "You, are fast as fuck. It was a blur, but I saw you move, man."

Damien tried to return the smile, but it was hard to find any sense of joy and accomplishment. Pain, hunger, it was spoiling everything.

"Aye, he was." Fiona leaned in, and nudged her head against Damien's shoulder, before looking to the rest of the group. "We're in nae shape to fight. We should go home."

"Agreed," they said.

With lots of pained grumbles, all of them got up. As Damien did, Matthew offered him a shoulder, and Damien took it as Fiona got down on a knee beside him. In seconds, she wrapped his ankle in webbing. After a dozen or so circles of her hands around it, it was encased in a brace with the sturdiness of a cast. Thank God, he wouldn't roll it by accident, and he could put a little weight on it.

The walk back was a slow one. With every minute, Damien could feel his wounds heal, at least to the point they were becoming functional. He dare not put too much weight on his bad ankle, but he could tell it was repaired enough to function again, if he absolutely had to use it. Same for his wrist. A snap of the fingers would probably shatter the joint, and many other parts of his body in his current state, but at least bones were put back together, and his skin was healed over. Fiona didn't know how close to death he'd become, and he aimed to keep it that way. A younger Kindred would have been nothing but ash under a pile of rubble.

A door took them back to the higher level of tunnels, and Parker locked the door behind them. From there, it was a twenty minute walk to the nearest subway platform, and each step sent throbbing hunger up into Damien's skull. Fiona and Matthew were bleeding, and both were helping him walk. The proximity made smelling their blood easy, and he gulped on a dry throat as he tried to ignore the hunger.

Ever since Lucas's failed coup, Damien's secrecy was over, and he could feed as other Kindred did, without having to hide in stealth and shadow. Before, when every night was spent skulking, and every near encounter meant his potential death, he'd gone many nights starving. He'd barely passed his fledgling year before the Purge, and spent years terrified of suffering the fate of his fellow brothers and sisters of the church. A lot of hungry nights, riding the edge of frenzy, as he huddled in a ball, cold and scared in the tunnels, or abandoned basements.

He wasn't used to that creeping hunger anymore, and present circumstance was rectifying his forgetful memory.

"I'll head back to HQ and update the council," Vicky said. "Unless you feel you have to, Mister Right Hand Burksen."

She was trying to be funny. It wasn't, not at the moment. Her words grated on him, and he glared at her, but didn't let the rising fury lead to anything more. If he'd been Invictus, and not a Right Hand purely through Maria's recommendation, he might have felt more comfortable giving into his annoyance and yelling at her.