My Little Ventrue Pt. 07 Ch. 13

~~Beatrice~~

"Yeah," she said to Damien, "we do." The more she watched the hunters in the circle work, the more it became obvious Jeremiah and Angela were planning some final maneuver. The other hunters didn't come here in some last ditch effort to save their skins. They were just following Jeremiah and Angela blindly. She could see the terror in their eyes, panic driving each of them into animal hysteria. Every hunter, except for the leading trio and their four bodyguards, were fidgeting with their guns, checking the safeties, checking their belts for what ammunition they had left, and staring at the growing damage Clara was creating.

The barrier would break eventually. Either the dirt would collapse where Clara dug, and the line would be broken, or there'd be enough open dirt dug up that Clara would literally be able to throw her weight into the wall of earth, and cause it to crumble. One, maybe two minutes at most. But two minutes was an eternity in the middle of extreme chaos, with a few thousand rats and crows fighting to get in, and everyone sitting on the edge of death.

"Form a defensive line!" Jeremiah yelled. "We won't let these beasts have us."

While Clara continued to dig, Jack started to circle the hunters once again. If it weren't for the forest, a brisk walk would take a person around the clearing in a single minute. A large enough clearing for a dozen hunters, a dozen trees with sacrifices crucified on them, and a giant stone with a slab of human skin draped over it. But it was a clearing, a circle, and there was nothing stopping the paranormals from circling it. Once they got in, there'd be nothing stopping the paranormals from circling the hunters, and ripping them to shreds.

As Jack moved left again, his army of rats following him while the crows above hopped along branches or flew overhead, everyone else moved right. It was becoming obvious there was no need to cover the kid's back. If anything, once the shooting started, the kid would have to come save their asses, not the other way around. Beatrice, Damien, Othello, and the idiot hunter stayed mostly together as they moved around the circle in the other direction. Othello and Beatrice did their best to push down trees when they got in the way, but for the most part they stepped around them. It was a waste of vitae to summon the inhuman strength needed to push over giant trees, for her and Othello, at least. And Damien couldn't do it at all.

While the hunters were panicked as all fuck, and kept their eyes on Clara and the circling Jack, they didn't care too much about Triss. Two of them kept their eyes on her, and looked directly at her. An easy bridge for her to reach out, and—and nothing.

"Trying to hit them with a nightmare?" Damien whispered.

"Yeah. Can't get through."

"The amber line seems to block things of a paranormal nature. The black line blocks the physical."

"Y-Yeah," Harcourt said. They threw glances at him, until the man lowered his voice to nothing more than a quiet whisper. "We draw the amber line with one of Elen's tools, though it doesn't last long. And leave Jeremiah's special black powder as a line, but he doesn't have much of it."

"Those two," Beatrice said, clicking her crocodile teeth along each other as she glared at Jeremiah and Elen, "are a match made in heaven."

"You're telling me." Shivering, Harcourt started to lag behind, at least until Othello gave him a shove of the shoulder. "Yeah yeah."

Everyone's eyes went to Elen, as the woman had one of her hunter friends push her wheelchair along the grass toward the big stone slab. She took the stone knife, and starved writing in the skin.

"Sandor's locked up in the Elysium Tower," Jack said, grinning. "Cast what magics you want. I've seen where the Prince has him. Nothing supernatural is getting in there, spell or curse."

The hunters ignored him, for the most part. Elen continued her work, humming to herself in that sweet way old grandmas sometimes did. Angela dug through the bag and dug out a few more strange items, though at a certain point a pattern became clear. Everything that came out of the bag was some sort of preserved body part, with something done to it to make it unique; the shrunken head was the obvious example. At one point she pulled out a dried hand, and Triss snarled. The hand of a hanged man was a powerful artifact, according to some of the books Jacob had shown her. A Hand of Glory.

"Come on!" Jack said, laughing all the while as he knocked over another tree, making slow but sure progress around the clearing. "There's no getting out of there. You're dead, all of you, dead! Sure you don't have any final words?"

"Fuck you!" Angela, for all her obvious fury, kept her mind on the task; not even an attempt at banter. In fact, she looked disturbed. She pulled out another artifact, and another, and she treated each like a scientist might handling a petri dish of a deadly bacterium. Every one, she set down carefully, shivered a few times, and looked to Jeremiah with worry in her eyes.

"Fee-fi-fo-fum." Jack's laughter continued, growing louder as he pushed down another tree. This one he pointed at the barrier, and high above them the tree crashed into the invisible wall. Branches shattered, twigs rained down, and the forest thundered with the sound of thousands of bits of wood cracking under their own weight as the tall tree rolled sideways along the barrier, before falling to the side, shredding branches off of other trees on the way down. "I smell the blood of a stupid bitch."

Angela got up, and limped toward the hunters further out in the clearing. To run here despite having a limp was impressive, and Triss found herself smirking as she watched the woman move. This was the bitch who killed Julias, a psychopath caught up in her own drama. A hunter with her head jammed so far up her ass, she felt justified in slaughtering kine, innocent kine, so she'd have the tools she needed to fight monsters. Jack was right. How far the righteous had fallen.

Triss took time to analyze the woman's features. If she was going to enjoy ripping the girl's eyes out, now was a good time to get familiar with the woman before harm was done to her. Damn, she looked so much like Athalia, a tall, thin black woman, and even beautiful. The tattoos, the glass eye, the scar, it was obvious she'd been through Hell in her life, while her mother was basically unscarred, with no tattoos that Triss could notice. The human girl looked battered and beaten, and was obviously pushing herself forward to the detriment of every aspect of her life, in order to reach her goal. How much of that goal had been about killing her mother, and was now about killing Jack?

Well, fuck her. If her goal had just been to kill Azamel or Athalia, fine, but now it included killing Jack, her friend, and her lover's childe.

Dead lover's childe. In the end, that's all that really mattered. Angela killed Julias, and Triss was going to make her pay. Who Angela was, what trials she'd been through growing up with a monster for a mother, and then a psychopath hunter for a foster father, were irrelevant.

Jeremiah and Angela began walking around the circle, Jeremiah with book in hand, and Angela with the delicate objects held in her arms. He was reading from the book, eyes locked onto its text, and every word he uttered — some language she didn't know or recognize — had him grunting with the effort. It was tiring him.

"W-What's this?" the hunter closest to Triss said, as their two bosses came up to them.

"This will protect you," Angela said. She looked down immediately after saying it. Lying? The woman handed the confused hunter the shrunken head, gave Triss a single, hard glare, and moved on.

Triss was tempted to yell at her, scream, curse her name, make a boast, or maybe throw an insult about that time she literally ran Angela over. Anything, fucking anything to get a hook into Angela's mind, and get her angrier, make her suffer. But no, better to wait, and make the grand reveal about who Triss was and why she was hunting down Angela, when Angela was in no position to do anything about it. Maybe whisper 'you killed the love of my life' before tearing her throat out. Yes, that was the way to do it, a way Jacob would be proud of. Vengeance was a dish best served cold.

"Hey," Triss said to the hunter, once Angela and Jeremiah had moved on. "We've got you guys. You know that, right?" With all the commotion going on, it was difficult finding a good volume, something that'd let her talk to the hunter without Jeremiah and Angela noticing. But she found it, and the hunter, a short man with short blonde hair, managed only a quick flick of his eyes before looking back down at the shrunken head in his left hand, pistol in his right.

"Fuck you, vampire."

Triss looked to the others, and motioned with her head toward the path they'd been walking. They kept moving, Othello dragging along Harcourt before the man could protest. A few moments later, it was just her and the unknown hunter.

"You guys really fucked up, when you killed Jack's family and sire, you know."

"We didn't—"

"Shut up," she said, grinding her teeth. Jeremiah continued his chanting in the background as he moved onto the next hunter, Elen was humming to herself, and Jack and Clara were both making a racket. As long as no one started shooting and making even more noise, she could talk to this guy quietly, and he'd hear her. "Your bosses are psychos. Just look around you. How many humans have you sacrificed on this crusade to kill Azamel? Azamel, and now Jack, if Angela gets a say in the matter."

The hunter met her eyes, apparently trusting the amber line enough to keep Triss from tearing into his mind and planting a nightmare.

"You're a vampire, and you host a monster like Azamel. You can't possibly expect me to trust anything you say."

"I don't give two shits about Azamel."

"But—"

"Your boss Jeremiah is a fucking maniac willing to do anything to kill her. Angela follows him like a faithful dog, and just like Jeremiah and Azamel, she wants to kill Jack." Triss pointed at the grotesque head in the man's hands. "You even have any idea what that's going to do?"

"No... but—"

"And your friend Harcourt, no one broke his mind. He came to us. Well, he came to Jack. Normally Jack's the first person willing to talk and negotiate, but now you've woken up this thing inside him, and..." She gestured vaguely toward the kid, still stomping around, cackling, and destroying the forest. "And now, what about now? The fuck are your bosses going to do now? Far as Harcourt knows, Plan Vandermont is nothing but you guys setting up defensive positions and fighting us off. You really think you can fight us off now? You're in a big open clearing, for fuck's sake. Killing you all will be easy as shit, once we get inside."

"Jeremiah and Elen can do amazing things, vampire. They'll figure something out."

"Or maybe, your bosses are insane, and they're going to do whatever it takes to achieve their goal, even if that means dying in the process." She leaned in closer, set a hand against the invisible wall, and stared into the hunter's eyes with her snake eyes. "Think about it. How the fuck did we randomly catch Harcourt? He came to Jack."

"That Jack?" the hunter said, nodding over his shoulder toward the kid, on the other side of the clearing. The little guy threw a few more grotesque, gory threats, and pushed down yet another enormous tree as a swarm of rats followed along behind him like a second shadow.

"Not that Jack. Like I said, you guys woke up something nasty in that kid, something the rest of us don't have. Now, he's going to kill every single fucking one of you."

That managed to get a reaction from the small man, and he winced as he looked down. "Then why are you talking to me?"

"Because I know Jeremiah's tricked you all. Angela has, too. Put down the fucking head"—she gestured to the shrunken head in his hand—"down, and break the line. You can join Harcourt, and I'll make sure Jack doesn't kill you." She didn't think that was an empty promise. Jack would probably spare the life of a hunter if said hunter actively helped them defeat Jeremiah. But, then again, Jack with the curse controlling him was a fucking asshole, and she wouldn't put it past him... it... to be a backstabbing, lying shitface.

"Carver," Harcourt said, poking his head out from behind a tree, "come on, man. You heard about those stabbings, right? That was Angela! She—"

Jeremiah slammed his book closed, and came over to stand beside Elen. Angela and Jeremiah stood at the woman's shoulders, and the old woman continued to work the skin, an oxygen mask on her face. And, unless Triss's eyes were deceiving her, that book was fucking gleaming red now. It had an eerie glow, dark amber, almost like blood, like the flesh room Elen used to hide and repair her hunters.

Elen set one of her long, gross hands on the closed book, on its cover, and traced lines onto it slowly, while her right hand started to carve into the skin on the rock with the knife. The red glow from the book seeped up her white skin, along her veins, and disappeared underneath her loose gray dress. It wasn't long before the strange, stone knife began to glow as well. All the while, the old woman had a strange smile Triss could only barely see through her mask.

The head in Carver's hand began to glow.

"Carver," Triss said, eyes wide. "Drop it. I have no idea what that thing does, but Jeremiah's going to use you, just like these corpses on the trees. Drop it now, before—"

Too late. Carver stared at the occult object in his hand, and his gaze locked onto it. He squeezed it gently, but his mind was gone, like a child staring into a Christmas tree bulb.

Seeing the life drain from someone's eyes was not something she was used to. For all the murder she'd committed in her life, most of that was with her fangs on the target's neck, or when sacrificing kine for Crúac rituals, in which case they were usually unconscious. Looking someone in the eye, and witnessing their death, seeing their soul leave, watching their body and vessel turn into a fucking corpse, was not an experience she craved. The few times it'd happened, like when Jacob killed those kine Jack had brought, it'd left her with chills that never went away.

When Carver looked up from the object, and met her gaze, she saw it again. He fell to his knees slowly, but the effect was anything but slow. The color from his skin drained away. The thickness of his body, showing through his jacket and jeans, disappeared. His eyes emptied, like some motherfucker ripped his soul out through them. He became nothing more than a skin sack, filled with meaningless organs and unmoving blood.

"Carver! Carver!" Harcourt shook free of Othello, ran back over to Triss, and started pounding his fists against the invisible wall. "What the fuck!? What the fuck!?"

It didn't take a genius to figure out what was happening. The objects the hunters were handed, the glowing book, Elen touching said book and cutting new symbols into the skin on the stone. They'd cast a spell. Triss winced as she looked around the clearing at the hunters, and how each one of them were falling onto their knees, or straight onto their backs. All at once, without noise, without fanfare, without a final word to mark their passing, the other nine hunters that'd surrounded the outer edges of the clearing, died.

Triss stepped back from the body, but Harcourt didn't. He fell to his knees and started pounding his hands against the air harder, blocked and incapable of helping. Guttural noises left his mouth, grunts and yells, and Triss had to force her eyes off him to look at what was happening in the circle. She hated those noises, the mix of despair and frustration, of helplessness. She'd made them.

"What in the ever living fuck?" Jack said, looking down at the new bodies that decorated the clearing. "Sacrifices on top of sacrifices. You guys are going to burn in Hell, you know that?"

"Fuck you, fucking monster," Angela said. "There's a place in Hell for monsters like you, fucks who embrace their nature. Burning right at the fucking bottom."

The kid cackled again, and tilted his head as he looked at the remaining hunters. Jeremiah, Elen, Angela, and the four hunters they apparently trusted more.

Leaning forward, Jack set his hand against the barrier and chuckled. "Last I checked, Judas was freezing in the last circle of Hell, and being gnawed on by Satan himself, for being a traitor. Look forward to it." He used his other hand to gesture at the corpses of the hunters. "Let me guess. By betraying these people who believed in you, who had faith in you, the spell you're casting will be quite powerful. Makes sense. That's how Susanna gained her curse."

As if, finally satisfied, Jeremiah stepped away from the big stone, and toward Jack. Angela followed, and the four hunters covered their flanks.

"If I'd known there was something twisted in you," Jeremiah said, "I would have just killed you, instead of capturing you. There was nothing special about you. The divination showed that you knew about Azamel, had visited, and could be used to trick her into letting her guard down. You were to be a pawn, like Sándor, nothing more."

"Used? How would you use me?"

"The same way we used Sándor, and continue to use him." The rugged old man gestured to Elen's work behind him.

Before Jack could retort, a horrible noise, alien, thunderous, and layered with rasp and shriek over its bass undertones, filled the forest. Everyone raised their heads, as the booming roar ripped through the air until Triss felt it in her bones. She'd never heard that roar before, but it didn't take a genius to know that something that loud, that deep, that overpowering and overwhelming, had to come from something gigantic. And it came from the castle.