My Little Ventrue Pt. 06 Ch. 14

Her mouth parted, and she stared up at the sky, as crows descended upon the hospital. Their wings hid the sky, and their growing noise became unimaginable. Not so loud as to damage her ears, but overwhelming nonetheless, heightened by the eerie silence of the district moments before. Cawing, the squawking bird noise that crows made, distinct, unique, wholly recognized as a sound of death and impending doom. It was all she could hear, as the sky became a moving tapestry of shadow and feathers.

It was as if a demonic entity had sliced open the sky, spilled its obsidian, endless blood over the stars, and from it, an army of black birds came to reap the souls of her city.

She was stunned. She tried to move, tried to tell herself to ignore the birds, and enter the hospital, but the sight was horrific and beautiful. The squawking birds numbered in the thousands, and the volume of their calls only grew as they came closer, and closer. As they began to lower themselves onto the hospital, Antoinette gasped, staring, as dozens of the birds matched speeds, and smashed their beaks into the windows.

Many of the birds died, and each that did hit the glass with such force, that even staring up from the parking lot, many feet away, it sounded like a gunshot to her ears. She flinched, something she rarely did anymore, as more birds destroyed themselves upon the glass, harder, sometimes in pairs, in trios, quartets, and quintets at the same time. They hit the glass hard enough, that the loud crack of their beaks against the windows echoed against the walls of nearby buildings.

It took them maybe twenty seconds, before the windows exploded inward, such was the force of their determination. As a hundred crows fell to their deaths, bodies of fragile bones smashed into pulp against their targets, the glass broke, and thousands of crows flew inward into the patient rooms. Oh no.

Footsteps behind her grabbed her attention; Kindred ears captured the sound as pure reflex, rather than conscious effort, so loud was the army of crows and their kamikaze mission. From the sound and the pace, it was a Kindred.

"Prince," Damien said.

"Mister Burksen. I assume my love's other pet found you?"

"Found the Invictus, yes. Madam Turio sent me."

Antoinette frowned. This boy, a member of the Sanctified by Lucas's choice, had become Jack's friend. A frustrating position for Antoinette, who wished for nothing more than for the boy and his accursed religion to disappear. But, the man had proved his worth and reliability. If things continued as they were with Damien and Maria, Antoinette would have no choice but to eventually let them reopen the Lancea et Sanctum in Dolareido in an official capacity. She dreaded the thought, but she could not deny them for forever, lest the covenants feel her rule totalitarian. And that would lead to other troubles.

Even now she danced the Danse Macabre, as the sky parted to unleash its army upon the hospital. Sighing, she turned back to the building.

"Come," she said.

"... uh... you're coming, yourself? Are—"

"My sheriff and my student are both hunting down the cause of this power outage, Burksen. I assume Turio sent you because the other Invictus are indisposed. Logic dictates that we work together, and rescue Mister Terry and Mister Mire." She marched forward for the hospital front door.

"... alright. Then, I suggest we scale the building wall, and go in through one of the windows the crows are using."

She stopped and looked over her shoulder at him. "The sky devours us with endless wings, and you wish to perform yet another violation of the Masquerade? Do you not think kine are awake, and aiming their phones about at this very moment, filming this?"

"I'll Cloak us."

"I can tell from the way you move that you are injured."

"I..." Damien looked down at one of his hands, and the leg she noticed he was keeping his weight off. "I've fed enough to Cloak us. My injuries are irrelevant. I'm not going to let them hurt Jack."

She blinked at the man, and tilted her head to the side slightly. Those were powerful words, and not words she ever expected to hear from Lucas's childe.

Looking at the man could not help but spark memories within her. This young man, just old enough to be ancilla, had cut off one of her arms and legs. He had stormed her home with weapons and zealots, and the two of them had shared barbed words. He had played his hand, exposed what he thought of her, what Lucas thought of her, and had sent his companions to their demise in order to defeat her.

And he had failed, because of Jack. To see them become friends in the months that followed would forever be the rarest of social interactions and changes of personality she had ever seen in another. That did not change that the sight of the man sparked anger in her, and she was not comfortable with letting a man who had taken a sword to her, help her. For all her power, even she was vulnerable to a swift hand with intent to betray, and stab her in the back if she lowered her guard. Though, considering his injuries, she was the one helping him.

It was not that she could not use the Cloak of Night herself, but it was certainly not a discipline with which she had had much practice. Daniel offered to spend the time and teach her, but instead, she focused on the abilities that came naturally to Daeva, and her pursuits in the Coils of the Ordo Dracul. To her utmost annoyance, Damien's suggestion was the better approach.

"Very well." It took effort to keep the venom out of her voice. But now was not the time for such juvenile frustration; healthy paranoia, perhaps, but not childish antics.

The boy nodded, and summoned up his Cloak of Night. It was a subtle, hidden thing, for a Kindred to tap into their vitae, and encapsulate themselves, or others, in the aura of the Cloak. Humans watching would first have found their eyes sliding off the two Kindred, in such a way that did not garner attention. And then, as the full effect of a true Cloak of Night arrived, total invisibility followed.

The boy was powerful, to be able to encapsulate both her and himself in his Cloak, to the degree of total invisibility. Natasha could as well, but then, Natasha was a talented woman, and the Prince trusted her to handle herself with Daniel, despite how exhausted little Vola was after her return tonight. A talented Mekhet was a dangerous thing.

The two of them ran over to the hospital East Wing, from the outside, and looked up at the windows the crows were pouring in through. Such recklessness. Such insanity. Did Jack do this, or Julias? Their bloodline was impossible to predict, forever causing mayhem in her city with their surprising bursts of strength and talent. Viktor had ruled the Invictus under such strength, bullying his two fellow councilmen into submission. But Viktor was dead. Who was summoning the crows, and how were they managing such a massive number?

She sighed as she looked down at the dozens of dead crows at her feet. Neither Jack or Julias would be so cruel as to use Animalism, and send so many creatures to their death. But then, when Jack had escaped the hunters' torture, the reports indicated that many rats had died in his escape. Jack would never kill animals like that, never let himself become so drunk on violence and death, that he would kill hundreds of creatures to enact his will. Would he?

"It'll take me a few seconds to climb up," Damien said. "If—"

"Come." She grabbed him, and threw him. The man's eyes went wide, and he almost let out a yelp, before he managed to close his mouth at the last second. Fool boy was weightless in her grip, and she had no trouble launching him at one of the windows where fewer crows entered. If his Cloak failed, she would have to leave, and enter through the hospital front door instead.

It did not fail. Impressive. She leaped after him, keeping the distance between them small, so he would not have to extend his Cloak too far. Two vampires, dangling off a windowsill, outside a hospital. Très drôle.

How long had it been since she had left her tower, in pursuit of a mission? For decades now, over a century perhaps, she sent her thralls, or Daniel, to enact her will, to force the covenants into line, or to deal with kine who overstepped their limits. Not since the Purge had she truly used her own hands in such a way. She had forgotten the thrill of engaging things with her own fingers, to leave the safety of her tower, and seek out an objective, with purpose. She could not deny there was excitement to it, but any potential joy to be found was lost under the growing fear within her core. What had happened here?

She forced up the window - better than risking damage on the broken glass - and rolled into the room. Damien followed, silent and slick. His movements were terribly similar to Daniel, and she struggled to suppress both a smile and frown at the value and threat that represented. For now, she could trust him to watch her back, if only because she was standing and at full strength, while he was not.

The two of them stared down at one of the patients. The machines beside the man continued to beep, and the crows that filled the room avoided him. The ventilator continued, and the sensitive equipment such as the IV feeding into the man's body was untouched. The birds swarmed around the room though, and both vampires were forced to crouch to prevent them from hitting their heads.

The noise was immense. The birds were not trying to be stealthy, despite their seeming attempt to not accidentally kill or contaminate the patient in the room. They had somehow managed to open the door as well. She knew crows were intelligent, but—

As she stepped out of the door, she froze, and Damien froze behind and beside her. The two of them stared out of the hall, at the swirling maelstrom of feathers, and blood. The screaming of kine mixed into the chorus of caws, and Antoinette had to force herself to keep her hands off her ears in an attempt to block out the noise. The blood was everywhere, splattering and scattering across the whirlwind of flapping black shadows.

The hospital lights of patient rooms were low, with the hospital in low light mode on its generators. The lights of the hallway itself were off, and from the room they were entering it from, the two Kindred were looking down the hall toward the center of the hospital. And from there, their eyes were buried in the carnage and mayhem.

A body lay on the floor, and blood was splattered across the floor and walls, painting the white surface endless red. The clothes this person — a hunter, she surmised — wore, were torn to shreds, most of it removed and spread about, but enough of it remained for her to identify them. Birds, hundreds of birds, were tearing into the corpse, ripping flesh through the holes in their clothes with their beaks and reckless abandon. As if piranha had been given wings, the creatures devoured the body with enough mouths, and with such speed, that she could see bits of bone emerge before her eyes. The hunter was a woman, though the defining curves soon disappeared under beak and gore.

If anyone was alive in the madness, she could hear them no longer. The scream she heard a moment before was gone, and another scream, a woman's, rose to a banshee shriek, before it died off as well.

She wanted to move forward, to leave the doorway and enter the madness, find Jack, find Julias, but she could not. If she entered the pandemonium before her, surely the crows, an ocean of violence unhinged, would devour her; or at least, harm her to a degree she refused to underestimate. A whirlwind of claws and beaks was not to be dismissed lightly.

She peered at the flapping darkness, and after a few more seconds, she called out. "Jack? My love?" To get through the noise of the murder, both the act and the group of crows, she had to call loud. It would give away her position to any hunters, but it was worth the risk.

And, as if parting the Red Sea, the crows split apart. While many stayed on the floor, dotting it to the point they were wing to wing, eyes glistening in the flickering shadows, others continued to fly, soaring over along the ceiling, and along the wall. Many birds flew past her and out the window, clearing space, and in the mouths of the birds, was flesh. As the thickness of the sea of feathers lessened, the sight of more corpses drew her eyes. Disgusting, how the birds had shredded the clothes of these hunters, pecked out their flesh, destroyed their faces, tore off skin and chunks of muscle.

Antoinette had seen many forms of torture in her second life, and only a few were able to match the sheer animal brutality this senseless mayhem had brought forth.

Jack, her little Ventrue, stood only fifteen feet away. A crow sat on each shoulder, his pets, and the boy wore a smile. His suit was coated in blood, as was his skin, human blood that drenched him, dripped from his fingers, and flowed down his body. But the mess of gore was not what struck her cold, it was the strange smile on his face. She had never seen him wear such an expression.

"Annie!" the boy said, hands out as if to embrace her arrival, but not her physically. "Good news! Well, good and bad." Annie? Not once, in the nigh two years she had known this boy, had he ever called her that. "Damien too, sweet."

"... Jack," she said. "Where is... where is Mister Mire?"

"Dead." Nodding, sighing, he crouched down, and the birds that covered the floor hopped aside, pushing wing to wing so they could reveal a patch of dust and dirt, soaked in blood. "Hunters got him."

Antoinette could not move, every muscle and tendon in her body frozen. Who was this boy? It was not Jack Terry, her love. The inflection in his voice, the confident and almost sinister gaze, the odd smile, none of it belonged. In the corner of her eye, she could see that Damien felt the same, as the man stepped forward slightly to stand beside her, and he kept his weight on the balls of one foot, ready to sprint forward in an attack.

"I... I am... sorry." Mire was dead? Oh no. If, that was truly what happened. This snake speaking to her could not possibly have been Jack, and now, as she stared at him, every word she heard from him became suspect.

"Yeah, I was pretty bummed. But! Good news. Crows say Mom is fine, they killed two hunters, which makes four total, if Elen can't revive the one I shot in the head, and I drained and popped one a minute before." Popped? "And the best news we've had in god damn forever, I caught Sándor."

She squinted for a moment, before she stepped forward. The crows moved aside for her, barely, while they gave her lover plenty of room; slaves, making way for their master.

Sure enough, Sándor the Begotten was there. The man was a mess, bleeding and broken, and she could tell many of his wounds had not been caused by the birds. He was on his back, but she could tell he was bleeding quite profusely from wounds underneath him, as blood leaked onto the floor around him. Someone had broken many of his ribs, if not all of them, and his face was a ruined mess, nose smashed and teeth lost. Every breath the man took was a gargled mess, blood oozing from his parted mouth and broken lips. Someone had thoroughly crushed this man.

Jack, or whoever this snake was, walked up beside her, grinned up at her, and then down at the shirtless man on the floor. "Julias really fucked him up. Never seen a Ventrue punch that hard. But it drained my sire pretty bad, left him defenseless." Crows sat upon the Begotten's arms and legs, and a few of them had left scratch marks there, some peck marks as well, but Sándor did not respond. He was close to death, but she doubted the horror inside the man would let him simply bleed out.

If Natasha's report about this Begotten's strength was to be believed, and it was, then Julias defeating him in a fist fight would have been horribly costly indeed. Impossible, even, for other Ventrue his age, but Julias was Julias. Was... Julias. She sighed, looked over Jack's head to the ashes upon the floor, and frowned at the crows stomping over it. Jack, her Jack, would have made sure his summoned crows would have not touched them. Her Jack would not have done any of the things he was doing now.

The crows upon Sándor's body cawed a few times, announcing their presence, and Jack chuckled as he squatted down over his prize.

"Hey, Sand." He looked up at her, and Antoinette struggled to not look away in disgust at the alien creature meeting her gaze. "Angela called him Sand, heh. Sand!" Leaning over the Begotten, he slapped the man's broken face, but found no response. "Damn, unconscious. Well, he ain't going anywhere. Let's check Mom." He pat the man on the chest, used the ruined ribcage to push himself up, and walked toward his mother's room.

And Antoinette followed, closely, as did Damien. She glanced back to him, and found the same fear in his eyes. He did not recognize this boy either. After a quick grimace, she nodded to Damien, acknowledging his fear with her own; and perhaps, warning him that she would soon act.

Jack stepped into his mother's room. She almost stopped him. Did the hunters have some sort of doppelgänger in their employ, or could somehow possess Jack and turn him into this snake before her? That made no sense. It was clear that Jack had done great damage to the hunters this night, thus, it was unlikely the hunters that were responsible for this change in Jack. Jack had always had an unusual, unknown element that people noticed, but this? This was beyond the pale.

The crows perched upon the bed, the chairs, the equipment, everything within his mother's room, but none touched the woman's body. Sensitive equipment was also left alone; crow claws and fragile equipment did not mix.

"They were going to take her," Jack said as he stepped in closer. "Take her, and Elen was going to do things to her. Probably cut her up, do some shit to her mind or guts, voodoo magic, or whatnot."

Antoinette sighed, but nodded. "To force your cooperation."

"Yep. Fuckers. Whatever, she's fine, and I'll get them. Kill them, rip them apart, shred them, throw their guts to the birds, my birds." Nodding to himself, he reached up and stroked the bellies of his two crows upon his shoulders. "The hunters are in the city, and they're not leaving; Jeremiah won't, at least, not until he's killed Azamel. So we have plenty of time to find them and skull-fuck their corpses. I—" As the devil creature leaned over the unconscious body of his mother, his voice came to a sudden stop, and he froze.

"... Jack?" Damien said, stepping around to the other side of the bed. "You ok?"

Antoinette, keeping a couple feet between her and the alien entity, looked down at his eyes. They were locked onto the face of his mother. His hands trembled at his sides, and his shoulders matched, quivering, as if the boy were carrying great weights in his empty palms.

She said nothing. Something was happening to Jack, something sinister, something horrible, and in the moment, something told her to watch. Let this unfold.

"I—" Again, his voice cut short, and the boy's right hand took the bed's edge with far more strength than required. "I... I..."

As Jack struggled, Damien slid a hand into his coat. The Mekhet was as suspicious of Jack as she was, and, at least in this, she could trust him to do something to help the boy, even if that meant cutting off his legs to incapacitate him. But Antoinette had no clue what was happening to her love, and if watching him struggle now provided some answers, then she was left with no choice but to observe.

She looked to Samantha. The poor woman looked horrible, but at least she had not been harmed by the influx of crows. Antoinette looked around at the many birds sitting about, and frowned at how some of them gobbled down bits of flesh, while others preened, rubbing at the blood that soaked their feathers. Some of that blood dripped onto floor, and Antoinette glared at the birds. Disease was a true risk for Samantha, and the current situation was a large problem.