My Little Ventrue Pt. 09 Ch. 10

She was stone-walling him, and he wouldn't be able to get anything out of her until he broke through that wall. Which meant this conversation had to get painful.

"Maria," he said, "I need to know why Michael and Garry hate each other so much."

"Ask them. I will not divulge Michael's secrets." At least she didn't fall back on last names and titles. There was some hope for the conversation.

"I'm tempted, believe me. But I know it'll end badly."

"Obviously."

"So I'm asking you."

"And I said, no."

"I'm going to stop this stupid war before it gets people killed, Maria."

"Gloria's childe has already died."

"You don't believe that."

She frowned, but it lasted a whole half a second before her face solidified. "Damien tells you too much."

"He is my best friend."

"Yes, for some reason."

For some reason? This woman, this fucking woman, was still thinking about Jack in a bad light. Sure, she was willing to leave him be. Sure, she accepted and knew Lucas had become a horrible person that needed to die. But the woman still couldn't get past her hatred for him, and that was a problem, a problem he needed to resolve right now.

~Scully, Mulder, this is going to get violent. Get high.~

Both familiars took to the air, and found perches high up on the second floor balcony. It being a cathedral, the second floor was really high up. They should be safe. And with their new undead bodies, they wouldn't die from a random piece of wood hitting them.

Time to poke the bear.

"You want a reason? Because, despite being sired by a fucking psychopath, Damien has a conscience. He knew what he was doing was fucking wrong, and that's how I managed to Dominate him. He was struggling with every single request his sire made of him, and it made him vulnerable. And that was a good thing, because only a fucking lowlife would be comfortable doing the things Lucas wanted to do. Damien couldn't stomach the shit Lucas demanded of him, and it was eating him up inside. And that's why he's my friend."

Maria went completely still. Still no frown or eye movement, but all normal subtle movements stopped as well, the tiny things even vampires did, shifting weight or tapping fingers and stuff. It all stopped. He was looking at a statue. All that meant was he'd have to hit her harder.

"You get what I'm saying, Maria? You were lovers with a monster, and it made life hell for a lot of people. Damien's had fifty years of hell because of Lucas, and you're not innocent in that." That earned a small twitch from her, but nothing more. "I don't know how many people Lucas killed who didn't deserve it. A lot, I'm guessing. A lot of good Kindred who didn't know better died attacking the Prince under his orders, too. Just thinking about the vampires that died, the ones Antoinette killed, the ones I killed using Damien, it makes me sick. Know why? Because unlike that shithole you loved -- love -- so much, I have a soul and a conscience.

"And that brings me to you, a bitter, fucking asshole. And I've been happy to stay hands off about it as long as you stayed out of the way, but it wasn't always like that, was it? You, stupid and out of your god damn mind, actually sold out the only woman to ever put up with your shit, and trust you. Natasha, one of the nicest people in all of Dolareido. You sold her out, knowing full well it might get her killed, because you were so pathetic, so desperate, you'd do anything to help that monster." He leaned in toward her a little, enough so he knew she could see him in the corner of her eye. "You sold her out for thirty pieces of silver. Except not silver, you sold her out for dick. Hope it was worth it."

Slowly, the ghost woman turned to face him, just her head though, like a scene out of a horror movie where a corpse turns its head. And the ice cold fury in her eyes froze him to the bone.

If there was one way he was going to die, it'd be pissing off a woman like Maria.

"The only reason you are not dead, Jack, is because the Prince--"

"I already told the Prince I was paying you a visit, against her wishes." Interrupting an elder like Maria was a perfect way to make her angry. More kindling for the fire he was trying to build. "Whatever happens, happens. The Prince won't take it up with you, no matter what. You wanna take a swing at me? Go ahead, cause I'm not leaving until--"

She didn't move, still staring at him, but the world around them froze solid. Not frozen in cold, but darkness, as if black emptiness could bring things to a perfect standstill.

And that's when her vitae, and her will, slammed into him.

Jack stood up with a jolt, but it was too late. The shadows grew, and grew, and Maria slipped away, a blurry haze that faded into nothing as endless obsidian swallowed him whole. Shit, shit shit. He expected her to take a swing at him, not come at him using Nightmare. Oh shit shit fucking shit, Jack you fucking idiot.

He reached for his necklace. If he was going to take her in a fight like this, he--the necklace was gone. What? Where was the necklace? Why was it gone?

"It's gone because you're gone," a familiar voice said. His voice.

"What?" He spun around in the empty black, looking for the source. After three spins, he jumped back from a tall slab of something moving. No, not moving, a mirror, catching his reflection and showing his movements. A creepy mirror at that, with black vines for a frame, covered in thorns.

The mirror was tall, allowing Jack to see from foot to face, and he stared at his reflection, and the things behind it. Dolareido. His mansion. His old apartment. Bloodlust. Xnomina. The Elysium Tower. His reflection grinned at him, and Jack met the bastard's eyes as more things slid past him in the mirror. Damien and Fiona, sitting around, chatting, with each other and the reflection still looking at Jack through the mirror. Natasha and the boys sat across from them, in Jack's mansion, chatting away. Jessy and Eric faded into view, talking with the rest of them. Eventually so did Triss and Jennifer. His mom, Antoinette, even Elaine and Antoinette's ghouls all faded in.

Finally, after the room was full of people happily chatting away, each often making statements towards the reflection in a language Jack couldn't understand, Veronica faded in. His first thrall, dressed in her half suit half maid uniform, came up to the reflection, and tugged on his hand in that meek 'please master do things to me' way she liked to.

Jack's reflection grinned at Jack, slowly turned around, gently took Veronica's head, and broke her neck.

"No!" Jack grabbed the mirror, but the thorns stabbed into his hands and drew blood. Red, regular, normal blood.

His reflection grinned back at him again, and then the others. They didn't notice what the monster had done, and kept talking with each other. The reflection stepped over Veronica's twitching body, and got to work on the rest of the group. First Damien, his best friend. He pulled Damien's head off just as the man's eyes went wide in realization, only to crumble into ash. Fiona noticed, and erupted into harsh screams, but the reflection turned and slashed her throat open with a knife from within his suit jacket. She stared at him, eyes wider than Jack ever thought possible, and she fell to her knees, blood gushing down over her t-shirt.

He kept going. Art and Matt next, he stabbed each of them in the chest, straight in the heart, and blood squirted from the gaping wounds. Natasha shrieked, and the reflection cut her head off. It bounced once, twice, before crumbling into ash.

And on it went. Jessy and Eric died next, Eric only realizing they were under attack when Jack's reflection killed his lover. Then Jennifer, and Beatrice. Then Antoinette's ghouls. They all shrieked in terror and agony as they died.

The reflection took his time with his mom and Antoinette. He forced them both down on their knees, as if he had the strength of a god, and they were helpless to him.

"Don't!" Jack screamed into the mirror, squeezing it harder and shaking it. The thorns drew more of his blood, but the vines held the mirror solid.

"Please don't! Jack, please!" his mom cried, but the reflection didn't stop. Grinning at Jack, his reflection sawed through her neck, taking his sweet time beheading her and earning more screams, sending dark vampire blood everywhere before it turned into tiny puffs of burning cinder and cooling ash.

Antoinette shed a single tear, and closed her eyes, not saying a word or showing any weakness, as Jack's reflection did the same to her. He grinned at Jack with every slow sawing motion of his hand, blade slicing through his lover's neck like butter.

Surrounded by corpses and piles of soot, Jack's reflection walked up to the mirror again, drenched in blood and crimson-soaked ashes. Behind him, Elaine grinned, and she leaned down to hug his reflection from behind.

"If you had shared with me," Elaine said, not to his reflection, but to him, her brown eyes staring into his through the mirror, "none of this would have happened. If you had given him to me, they wouldn't have had to die."

"You... you did this!?" Jack let go of the vines and punched the mirror straight on. It vibrated as his wounds splattered the flat surface with blood, but it didn't break, sending agonizing pain through his hands. "Elaine!"

She ran her hands down his reflection's bloodied suit jacket and shirt, and groaned in delight as she kept her gaze locked with Jack's.

"If only you had given me what I wanted. Now, well, I guess I'll be to the Ripper, what Antoinette was to you, Jack. And we'll do more than treat Dolareido like a petri dish. We'll control this city, and everyone in it will be our slaves."

Jack slapped his bleeding hands against the mirror again and again, desperate to get through, eyes blurring with tears. Stop them! Stop them! Do something! But he couldn't do anything, blocked, stopped by this mirror.

This must have been what it was like for the Ripper, locked in Jack's mind, unable to affect the world around him. Somehow, he'd lost the necklace. Somehow, the Ripper had broken free when Jack wasn't being vigilant with the meditations Elaine taught him. Somehow, something had happened, and now everything was over.

It wasn't fair! This was... this was...

This wasn't real.

Jack pushed the pain in his hands out of his mind, and glared at his reflection and the vampire hugging him as he stood up.

"Maria..."

The people in the mirror didn't respond.

Growling, Jack glared at his reflection and the woman beside him, and he clicked his teeth together as he found the words. The words were there, buried in the obsidian endlessness that pressed in on his brain, filling him with a cold only death could understand, but he found them. He dragged them up from the muck, from a blurry underworld where Maria tried to hide them.

"This isn't real. This isn't fucking real!" Slowly, he pushed a finger against the mirror. His hands no longer bled or ached, and the finger's gentle touch was enough to put a spreading crack through flat surface toward its edges. The reflection's image was cut across in several places, but it still held its ground, glaring at him. "This is a nightmare."

"Nightmare's can reflect reality." Maria's raspy, corpse voice. The ghost woman stepped out from behind the mirror, and joined Jack, glowering as she eventually stood beside him and gestured at the mirror. "This curse is going to eat you up, Jack. It's going to ruin you, like it did Viktor. It's going to take over, and kill all the people you love. And Elaine wants its power, you know that. She'll betray you, and take the power for her own. Just as she sired Viktor to be her tool, she will use her great grandchilde as a tool."

Jack forced himself to look in the mirror, to see his blood-soaked, grinning reflection, and the elder vampire still hugging him from behind. Elaine winked at Jack through the mirror again as she pressed her chest hard enough against his reflection's back, her large breasts pushed her suit jacket apart. The nightmare made sense, and every second he looked at his reflection, it threatened to pull him back into groggy, horrific belief. It could be real, it could be so very real.

But it wasn't.

With a heavy growl, Jack withdrew his finger, tightened it into a fist, and punched the mirror again. And this time, it exploded, shards of the nightmare scattering over the endless black around them.

The threading splinters of breaking mirror extended past the dark, bloodied vines surrounding it. The threads shot outward up and around Jack into the black around them, cutting through the onyx, and filling his ears with the sound of shattering glass. And, as if summoned by his own mind, the darkness did exactly that, shattering and crumbling around him.

He turned to his side, and met Maria's eyes again, watching her as her Nightmare collapsed into nothingness. Piece by piece, the illusion crumbled, leaving the two of them still staring at each other. Back in the cathedral, back with pews and stained glass windows. Back among unlit candles and a crucifix hanging behind the nearby pulpit. The two of them stood by the front pew, facing each other, the way they had been in the Nightmare.

"You broke my Nightmare quickly," she said, glaring at him with intent to kill, fangs bared. No ice anymore. Just fire. "I suppose you have your curse to thank for that."

Surprisingly, he didn't. He clutched his necklace, thanked God it was there this time, and returned Maria's glare.

"Not really. It was just that you made a mistake." Perhaps more than that. Ventrue tenacity, and his fucking stubbornness certainly helped. But she had made a mistake.

"Mistake?"

"You crafted that nightmare yourself, didn't you? Had some horrible idea you'd been brewing for some time that you wanted to hit me with."

Her glare was her answer.

"Well, you made a mistake," he continued. "You showed Elaine being ok with Antoinette's death."

Maria's eyes softened, if only barely. "You honestly think that old snake would care if the Prince died?"

This woman. This woman! Just when Jack thought she wasn't as bad as the rumors painted her out to be, she turned around and proved otherwise. No, she couldn't be all bad, not when she was willing to let Jack live despite knowing he killed Lucas. She wasn't the monster people thought she was, but she was a bitter, broken woman, sad with the world. Damien had said as much, but seeing her like this hurt him down to his guts. As much as Lucas deserved to die, Jack had been the one to kill him, and that meant Maria's pain was partly his fault.

If he was going to do anything about it, he had to get through to her.

"Elaine is a crafty snake, I agree with you there." He took a step toward the small woman, four feet now between them. "But she wouldn't kill Antoinette, or let her die. Hell, if push came to shove, it wouldn't surprise me to see Elaine risk her life to save Antoinette's. That's a friendship that won't ever die."

"I don't--"

Jack took another step closer. "I know you don't! You're so convinced everything and everyone in this world is horrible. So convinced everyone's a shitty person, deep down, so convinced that there's nothing and no one in this world worth living for."

Her eyes widened again at that, and she looked down as she took a step back. That'd hurt her, a lot more than he'd meant for it to.

"Damien told you?"

"What? Damien hasn't told me... oh, oh Maria. Is that what that thing with Avery was about? You were hoping she'd--"

Maria hit him, hit him hard, and he wasn't prepared for it. Seeing her face crumble, her expression destroyed by the turn of the conversation, had completely pulled his feet out from under him, and he let his guard down. So when she put all her power into a punch and drove it into his chest, it sent him up and over, flipping once before sprawling on his back. His eyes snapped open wide, and he stared up at the ceiling as reality came back to him.

She'd broken bones. A lot of bones. So much for her arms not being fully healed.

Snarling, he pulled his necklace off and tossed it behind him. Scully flew down and scooped it up as Jack forced himself to his feet. Maria was already marching toward him; hitting him so hard had launched her back a ways, too. And thankfully she wasn't a Mekhet or Daeva, not enough speed to close the distance instantly.

He rolled to his feet, and summoned his vitae. Ventrue Resilience pumped through his undead veins, forcing his bones back in place and knitting them together well enough he could move without crumbling. Without his necklace to hold his Beast down, the unnatural power of the curse flooded him. It was a pale comparison to what it could summon when the Ripper was running the show, but it'd be enough to fight Maria. Fight her, and hope to god he could get through to her.

"Maria."

"Silence! How dare you, how dare you! Vile, filthy child." She dove at him, face locked in a snarl. But he stepped to the side, hands up and pushing aside her punch. "I'll kill you!"

"No you won't!" Christ, if she killed him, that'd really suck. This whole gambit would be pretty damn pointless if he died.

"You don't understand me! You know nothing!" She came at him again, and instead of the cold, deadly woman who'd hit him with one nasty Nightmare, this woman was an inferno. This was good. Crazy rage meant power, sure, but it also meant mistakes, and emotion. It meant he might get through her icy walls and actually reach her.

"I know enough! I know how hurt you are! I know how much Lucas meant to you, and I can't imagine how much it must have hurt to see him becoming who he was!" He ducked under her punch, and drove his knee up into her chest. He didn't have the strength of an ancient Nosferatu, not like the Ripper did, but he could still throw a damn good knee, and Maria screamed in pain and anger as his knee folded her in half.

But she recovered quickly, too damn quickly, jumping back to her feet and coming at him again, throwing punches and claws alike. She didn't have claws, but the ghost woman's normal nails would have been enough to cut through suit and skin, with how much power she was putting behind those swings.

"Shut up shut up!" Her fist found his forearm, and the blow sent him spinning. Only Resilience kept his arm from breaking in half like a twig.

She'd expected it to break though, and he capitalized, crouching in close and driving his fist up into her jaw. As scary as Maria's unusual Nosferatu deformation was, with her corpse skin and misty body, she was still a vampire, made of dry meat and bone. A hard punch to her jaw sent her flying back, but she quick-stepped with the motion backward and kept from falling over.

"Maria, you know why I'm here, talking to you now? You know why I rushed over to get to you when Damien sent me that warning? Why I stopped Avery?"

"Don't disguise your issues with Avery, and your need with information about Michael, with some sort of care for me, Jack."

"You think I don't care about you?"

"Of course you don't care about me!" She threw herself at him, full on banshee, screaming while her white gown flowed in the air around her. But like he expected, she was full on rage mode, and not thinking straight.

He ducked underneath her, and threw a fist up, catching her in the stomach. She should have seen it coming, but she was blind with anger. Taking her down would be easy. She folded over his fist, and momentum kept her going, turning her into a ball that crashed onto the stage beside the pulpit.

"Maria! I came here to talk to you because I need information, yes. And I know that you hate me, hate me for what I did, but I never hated you!"

She recovered quickly, driven by hate he'd only ever known for someone once before. The sort of hate that boils in the blood and burns in the bones. The sort of hate that drives you like a whip on the back. She wasn't thinking straight, she wasn't thinking at all, but that's what he needed if he was going to get through to her. He just needed to make sure she didn't tear him in half before he did.