My Little Ventrue Pt. 08 Ch. 02

"Yeah?"

"Yes. The strange tears I have seen."

Oh shit. "You've seen them?"

"I have. I don't know who's made them or why they're there. But they're there, around where Dolareido exists."

"And you've never seen them elsewhere?"

Sándor shook his head. "No. Whatever they are, they are unique to Dolareido."

"Can... can you take me to one of them?"

"Yes, but so could the other Begotten."

Jack nodded. "They could, but sunrise is in a few hours, and it could take time to get Damien and Fiona, or Azamel involved. Besides, we're just gonna take a look, not go through it or anything. Let's go."

Sándor nodded. No arguing, no convincing, he just did. Awesome. The two of them got up, and Jack followed him to the front door.

Except, opening the door revealed someone about to knock.

"Clara?" Oh shit shit.

"Jack." She smiled at him, then at Sándor, then at the mansion as she looked past. "Jesus. This place is right out of a romance novel."

"It's very over the top, isn't it?"

"Yeah. Uh... can I come in?" She tilted her head to the side as she realized what was happening. "Oh, you were leaving. Figured you just got the door for me."

"No, uh, I didn't. Sándor and I were going to check something out."

"Check something out?"

"Yeah, um, something important." Jack looked to Sándor, but the Begotten kept his mouth shut, arms folded across his chest. Right, great, now was a great time for him to stop talking, instead of being useful and saying something that might get Clara to leave. The Uratha didn't know about the weird presence in Dolareido, and he wanted to keep it that way. For all he knew, one of them was the culprit. Uratha could cross the Gauntlet using their natural abilities, so maybe one of them was doing the damage.

"You're... going to look into the strangeness happening, aren't you?"

"Strangeness?" Fuck.

"Don't even bother trying to pretend you don't know what I'm talking about. You're not that good a liar, not yet."

Fuck fuck.

"It's nothing personal, Clara. But, you know, vampires and the whole Danse and shit, right? I don't know what's going on, and I need more information. At the same time, the less people who know, the better."

"Well that's too bad, because I'm calling in my favor."

"You can't be serious."

"Totally," she said, the language announcing her age. A bit older than she looked. "Something's going on in this city, and I want to know what. Spirits are talking about resurrection, and more than a few have mentioned the 'ghost lady', Maria." She air quoted ghost lady. "So yeah, the pack's getting pretty nervous about that, cause we don't know why the fuck spirits would be involved in that. And more than a few of the pack have seen some strange tears in the Hisil, like, big cuts in the ground and in walls and shit."

Jack winced with every sentence. Not because he didn't already know these things, but because Clara was being so honest about it. No effort to twist her words, to say less than she knew, or to imply things rather than say them. No subtext, no manipulation, she just said them.

And he owed her. Anything she wanted.

"You... you want in," he said.

"Yeap."

"Can you promise me you won't tell anyone?"

She frowned and folded her arms across her chest. "Not even my pack?"

"Yeah."

"Why the fuck wouldn't I tell them?"

"Because we don't know what's happening, or who's causing it. This is tricky business, Clara. For all I know, one of your pack is possessed and is up to something."

She didn't look convinced, but after a while, she sighed and nodded. "I can't promise I won't tell them for forever, but I'll keep my mouth shut for now."

"Good enough." He opened his mouth, but looked left and right first, before shutting it. "Actually, let's walk and talk. The house could be bugged."

"Bugged?"

Nodding, he stepped out onto the huge driveway. Scully and Mulder flew overhead, quiet, and blending into the night sky perfectly. With how many crows they had in Dolareido, those two could hide in plain sight, even up in Rich Side.

"Like I said, no one knows what's going on, except that it's a big deal. So until I have some kinda clue, I need to be smart about this." Once the three of them had some distance behind them, he felt comfortable enough to continue. "Something's been tearing at the realms. Like, not just the spirit realm, but the dream one, too."

"The dream one too?"

"Yes," Sándor said.

Jack gestured to the Begotten as he walked. "The Begotten were the first to find out about it. Azamel told me, not long after she arrived in the city. So whatever this thing is, it's been at it since then, at least."

"Who else knows?"

"Natasha and Damien. The Prince and the sheriff. And the Begotten." He was taking a huge risk trusting Clara, but, he couldn't help himself. She was that sort of person, someone he could trust, and someone he wanted to trust.

She raised a brow. "That's it? Five vampires and five monsters? If this is so dangerous, then--"

"We don't know who's doing it."

"So?"

"So, if we spread the word about what's happening, whoever they are might change tactics." He shrugged. "Don't let the enemy know you know."

"Ah, like Churchill and Coventry."

Jack shook his head. "That's a myth."

"Really?"

"Really. But, the idea still applies. If we're going to catch this thing or person, and take advantage when they make a mistake, we have a better chance if they don't know we know." But after a second, he shrugged and sighed. "Of course, they might know we know. The evidence hasn't exactly been hidden."

"So, you think... what? That Maria is--"

"We don't know it's Maria."

Clara took his shoulder and forced him to look at her. "David says the spirits are talking to Maria, the same spirits we've seen hanging around some of these strange tears. Red wraiths."

Jack shivered. Red wraiths. The one encounter he'd had with them had not been fun, with him, Damien, and Fiona running for their lives until Clara and Flowing Sanctuary showed up and saved them.

"Those red spirits," Jack said. "They were obsessed with flesh."

"Yes, they are, kinda like how someone attempting to, oh I don't know, create a flesh body might be? We're pretty sure they work for Black Blood, and... and if there's anyone capable of something as crazy as resurrection, it's Black Blood." It was her turn to shiver. "Black Blood's nothing like anything the pack has seen before. Avery warned us, but... fuck."

"I don't want to blame Maria just yet. Not enough evidence. And she's not some psycho crazy woman who'd risk destroying the city and everyone in it, for something as selfish as resurrecting a dead lover." He hoped. "And besides, if she was working with Black Blood, then Jacob must have tried something like this before, considering how close he is with the spirit. Minerva's still dead."

"Maybe Jacob's using her? Using her for a trial run? Vamps like him play the long game."

Sighing, Jack stopped walking as the driveway joined the streets of Dolareido. They were still in Rich Side, and no one walked the streets in the middle of the night in Rich Side. Safe to keep talking, mostly.

"Maybe. But--" He blinked, looked down, and rubbed his head. "Mary said she could see tears, too."

"Mary? Your... the ghost. She's seen tears too?"

"Yes. So something's happening in, uh, whatever place it is that ghosts go to when invisible, I guess."

Sándor finally spoke up. "It sounds like, whatever it is that's causing these tears, is doing so across many realms."

"Sándor and I were going to go check out one of the tears, one he found in the dream world."

"Just you two? I... I suppose considering it's you two, you could probably handle anything thrown at you."

Jack grinned at her. Much as it was the curse, not Jack, that had so much power to throw around, he couldn't help but feel good about what she said. Typical Ventrue.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Sándor found them a place similar to one of his lairs, and opened a door. It didn't matter how powerful Jack became, he doubted any Kindred would ever feel comfortable leaving the world of flesh and blood. In Dreamland, his powers were far less useful.

For the Begotten, it was the other way around. Sándor's human body faded in the shadows, and the enormous gargoyle emerged, like Pennywise stepping into its lair and exposing its spider-like monstrous form. And damn, Sándor was tall. At the sight of the monster stepping out of the black and into the halls of his strange dream castle, Clara whistled.

Jack eyed her, eyebrow raised.

"What?" She said, shrugging. "Dude's tall, dark, and handsome."

"He also has four arms, and horns and wings and stuff."

"Heh, tell that to Jessy. Fur and a snout don't seem to bother her."

Jack half expected Sándor to jump in and say something, considering they were basically talking about how several women seemed to find his transformed body attractive. But the huge beast said nothing. His human body had a habit of being quiet and still. His enormous gargoyle body frequently went dead silent and completely still, like a statue.

"And," she continued, "you saw one of the pack at the party last week, right? Practically getting DP'd on the floor? I know one of those vamps has a werewolf kink, and has asked her about transforming for sex."

"Into the full werewolf form, right? Not, like... the wolf form?"

Clara choked on a laugh. "No you sick bastard, the full Gauru form. Dangerous as fuck, but some of you vampires are kinky fuckers," she said, still laughing. Jack laughed too. Clara had a great laugh, and he couldn't help himself. "Sándor," she continued, "you uh... I mean, feel free to not answer, but I'm pretty sure that Fiona girl can have sex while in her spider body, especially with how she drapes herself all over Damien while in it. Is that something your Horror's body can do? Cause if no, there's a few women I could probably update."

Sándor snorted, a loud, heavy sound, but in the following silence, he sighed. "I can."

Clara laughed harder, and poor Sándor stared at the two of them with his typical cold, stone face. It wasn't a pure, silly laugh though. Something else came with it, a sort of sad sound, and Jack's laugh slowly died off as he watched her. She was trying to make Sándor laugh, to spread her laughter to him. Maybe it was a canine thing, a desire to share joy, or uplift others. It wasn't working very well on Sándor, but it made Jack smile.

"It figures," she said, after her laughter died down. "Come to Slut City, and everyone gets laid, in every way possible."

Sándor snorted again, shook out his wings, and started down the path outside. "Follow."

Jack and Clara watched the enormous creature push open the giant wooden doors, and lead them outside, to the narrow cliff path they'd seen before. But before they stepped out after him, Jack leaned in to Clara.

"I don't think we should touch that subject with him."

"What, sex?"

"Sex, romance, anything like that. He's still really beat up about his family."

"Ugh, my bad. Figured Jen would have gotten into his pants already, considering, you know, it's Dolareido."

"He's not from Dolareido." And probably didn't frame everything in a sexual context, like basically everyone in Dolareido did.

Nodding, Clara stepped out onto the cliff, and sucked in a breath. It was windy, it was night time, and the cliff road wasn't exactly wide. Ten feet across sounded like plenty of space, until a misstep meant careening off a mountain and into fucking clouds, that likely hid an astronomical drop beneath. Then ten feet was nothing at all, and the each gust of wind felt like an attempt from God to murder them.

"Where is the tear?" Jack called out over the wind.

"Ahead, past the woods."

"Past?" Jack raised a brow, and stared out past the haunted village, and into the woods he and the gargoyle had torn up a couple weeks ago. "I thought those woods were endless."

"They are, in this chamber. You can reach another chamber from within."

Shivering, Jack rubbed his arms as he nodded and followed after. He didn't like this place. It wasn't because it was a haunted village; that was kinda awesome, and something any vampire would love to take advantage of, or at least visit. It was his memories of the village that bothered him. The first memories of the village, before he'd recovered from the curse's possession, were his most prominent ones, and they felt tainted. Dirty.

It only got worse as he followed the titan through the woods. A lot of the damage the two of them had inflicted was repaired, but not all of it.

"Jesus," he said. "I didn't really get how much... destruction we'd caused."

Destroyed trees, smashed tree trunks, and lots and lots of blood. The corpses were gone, and he could vaguely remember Sándor collecting them to bury them or something, but the blood was still there. Blood, guts, and a lot of dead rats and crows. He was happy he didn't bring Scully and Mulder into the dream this time. This couldn't have been an easy sight for them, either. At least the bodies weren't rotting. Maybe bacteria and such couldn't survive in the nightmare. If nightmare chambers were created by scarring, powerful incidents in the real world, then it made sense that the nightmare would only handle things that fit whatever defined the nightmare.

If the legion he'd summoned had died in Fiona's jungle, he bet they'd have started to rot, rotted thoroughly, and be devoured by carrion eaters by now. But in this nightmare, the focus had apparently been a scary, haunted village, with a scary, haunted castle, on a scary cliff edge, with scary, haunted woods between the village, and any hope of escape.

Sándor snorted, but kept walking. Despite his size, he knew where to step to avoid trees, zigzagging and slithering around the thick trunks and sharp branches. Clara and Jack followed in his wake, since it seemed like the best path. Any misstep could mean stepping on sharp branch, or getting one in the face, especially with how dark it was.

They came to a tree. A big, nasty, fat, ugly tree.

"I've seen this tree before," Clara said. Her night vision was much better than his. "Some idiots with an enormous tree harvester were sawing down trees, and they cut it down, and this huge evil black ooze creature came out."

Jack choked on a snort. "Was it voiced by Tim Curry?"

She grinned at him. "It was. You are way too young to have seen that movie."

"Ha. Well, Mom liked the old Disney movies, collected them, and insisted Mary and I watch them."

"Most definitely not a Disney movie."

He shrugged. "That's Mom for ya. She couldn't tell the difference."

Before they could start laughing, Sándor motioned toward the enormous, black mouth of the tree. On closer inspection, it wasn't a hollowed trunk, like Jack figured it was. It was an endless cave, black and more black, a tunnel into nowhere. Considering the size of the tree, even the giant gargoyle could fit, and as Clara and Jack stared, the titan folded his wings snug to his back, leaned forward, and walked into the tree on all fours, tail slithering in the air behind him.

"Maybe he's taking us to a Christmas wonderland," Clara said. "Or a Halloween one."

"Yeah, maybe." Shrugging, he followed after Sándor, happy to get out of the nasty forest and the memories it stirred.

Once they were through the tree, it was obvious where they had come out. A closet. And, upon further inspection, a hospital supply closet. And a very old hospital, at that.

"Ugh, I don't even want to know how this nightmare got created," Clara said.

Sándor rumbled as he pushed his way through the large doorway of the closet. Too big. His shoulders and horns tore the door frame apart, and Jack and Clara winced and sucked air between their teeth, as the titanic creature ripped the wall half apart on his way out.

"This doesn't seem like a very practical entrance for you, Sándor," Jack said.

"It's not. I found this chamber recently, hovering in the dream near the Terrence Hospital. I still need to rearrange my lair to fit them together, if I decide to keep it."

Right, Begotten doing Begotten things, manipulating the very dimension of their existence.

Jack looked around at the hospital hallway, and sighed. Yeah, this was a hospital from probably sixty or eighty years ago, which meant treatments were brutal and inefficient compared to today. People were also a lot more superstitious, and believed in things like ghosts. He rolled his eyes. Ok, maybe not superstitious if they were actually correct, but he was pretty sure almost all those people who said they'd seen ghosts, were lying or had overactive imaginations.

"We're in the basement, right?" Clara said. She looked up at the old bulbs in some very tacky glass shells, and down at the hard, dirty floor, and white walls.

"Yes," the gargoyle said. "I sensed a disturbance, when I touched this chamber. It led me here." He motioned for them to follow, and they did.

The old hospital was creepy as fuck. The shitty old lights flickered, and didn't provide nearly as much light as they should have. The nearby doors, all closed, showed darkness underneath them, and a lot of the shadows moved, as if someone on the other side of the door was casting a shadow, and walking around. They moved with heavy footsteps, deep, resounding, and alien. Whispers drifted through the air, tiny things Jack barely noticed, but when he did, he could hear words hidden in the rasps.

'You're going to die here. There's no saving you.'

He pushed the voices away. If he'd been human, they'd have been terrifying. As a vampire, they were still terrifying, but not as much. Plus, the knowledge that he was friends with the nightmare's owner definitely lightened the fear factor.

Following the giant creature through the hallway was kind of funny, once he managed to ignore the obviously haunted hospital's attempts to scare him. Sándor was so damn huge, he had to walk on all fours, and keep his ludicrously massive wings snug to his back.

He stopped eventually, and sat down not unlike a dog would, and gestured down the hall ahead of him. Jack and Clara looked at each other, shrugged, and stepped around the beast. Both of them gasped at the sight of the tear.

"I've seen one other tear," Sándor said, "but this one is deep."

"Yeah, I can see that," Jack whispered, eyes wide and locked onto what he was seeing.

Tear didn't do the scene justice. It was like someone had taken a claw the size of a car, and dragged it across the air, somehow cutting through it and into the world and reality behind it. It floated in the air a foot above the ground, and reached from one side of the wide hallway to the other. The edges of the tear were frayed, and the gap of the wound was big enough that Jack could have jumped through it if he wanted to.

He could see things, glowing green things on the other side. They were moving.