My Little Ventrue Pt. 10 Ch. 03

"Chasing it?" Jack asked.

"Chasing. You heard it yourself, Jack. She's an Architect of Terror, and according to her, that means she's spent her time with the dragons studying the Beast. Now why would someone do that, someone who used to have power, power attached directly to their Beast?" The cursed laughed, a heavy rumble that shook the metaphor room. "She wanted the power back, of course. She did everything she could to find a way to get the curse back without the Strix influence."

Laughing all the more, until both Jack and Elaine were wincing, the curse extended an arm, something covered in feathers and ending in claws. He pointed it to the endless, infinite wall behind Jack, and waved an arm. The wall disappeared under an image, blurry colors that danced over the white, and both vampires watched, intrigued, and maybe a little terrified.

And then the projection came to them. Both vampires jumped back, startled, as the image the Ripper summoned became 3D, and surrounded Jack. It didn't cross the canyon, leaving Elaine to look on from a distance, but she had no trouble seeing with how defined the blurry images slowly became.

"Now that she's here," the Ripper said, and gestured to Elaine with a freshly sprouted black arm, "I think it's time to show you what sort of person Elaine really is, Jack."

Viktor. Elaine. A party. Jack winced as he stepped back from the images sitting around fancy tables drinking wine and whatnot. Not this again.

"Beast," Elaine said, "you cannot scare me off with a simple memory."

"But this isn't your memory, is it? You showed up out of nowhere after disappearing for years, and now look at you, watching Viktor, after a failed attempt to get back on his good side."

It was true. This was Viktor's memory. This must have been not long after Elaine showed back up in Viktor's life, and the man didn't want anything to do with her. He sat at one end of the table, and Elaine sat near the other. Jack didn't know anything about the party, who the people were, or how Elaine could show back up years later and just invite herself into their home. But she had. She chatted with the kine, the ladies in their gowns and bodices, and men in their penguin suits with lots of trim, from probably the 1700s. The rich people of Europe.

Elaine, the past Elaine, kept glancing Viktor's way, and every so often, she licked a fang. Not exactly a big tell, and easily mistaken for someone just being hungry, especially a vampire. But combined with the hunger in her eyes, the mad scientist hunger, it was obvious what was going on. It was a look she'd given Jack many times when they talked about the curse. She wanted to experiment on her childe.

The memory changed, this time to Julias.

"Ripper," Jack said, "don't--"

"Shut up." The creature chuckled as he slammed a hand against the white floor, before it again changed into a different floor. A street, Dolareido, maybe eighty years ago. People walked it, but not packed to the shoulder like today, and the clothes were kinda drab. Right after the industrial boom in Dolareido then, maybe?

Julias walked alone, face unreadable; probably on a mission for the Invictus. Slowly, Jack's sire looked up and then left, toward the road and across it. Old cars drove by, slow as hell considering it seemed to be the 1940s at night, and the city wasn't glowing so much back then. Someone on the other side of the street had caught Julias's attention.

Elaine. She met Julias's eyes, before disappearing into the crowd.

The Ripper sliced the image in half, and Jack jumped back as the creature's claws slammed into the street. The street vanished, and the images faded, leaving the three of them in endless white once again.

"How many times did you come to Dolareido, to see if you could somehow capture Viktor or his childe, and lock them away so you could experiment on them, hmm?" The mocking tone was palpable.

Elaine wouldn't be deterred. She stood her ground and stared at the monstrosity across the ravine, and even tapped her foot, like some kinda impatient mom.

"I admit it," she said, "and I know the others have surmised as much. I had great interest in the curse, and sought a way to isolate it."

"Isolate it, or reunite with it?"

"I never wanted you back, monster! Disgusting, abhorrent, vile creature. You are a tool to be harnessed and nothing more!"

Jack winced as he looked Elaine's way. Was that the first time she'd ever raised her voice? Hearing her get emotional like this, loud, angry, was strange as all fuck.

"Oh really?" The Ripper formed a head, a crow's head, enormous, and it reached out from the giant ball of mist with a snake's body for a neck. "And this ritual we're in? This isn't some little magic circle to let us just talk, is it?" Bird head still attached to the weird, long, black snake neck, the Ripper pecked at the space over the canyon, and his beak collided with the air. There was a wall there, invisible.

"I have no intention of telling you anything, creature."

The Ripper snarled hard enough Jack felt it in his throat. But after a few moments, the curse purred. "Then how about a trade?"

"A trade?"

Uh oh.

"You want to know more about Susanna, and the Strix gift. I want to know more about how you removed the gift from yourself. The ritual. Who you killed. All of it."

"Why do you want information? You are a tool. A magical tool, but a tool, and one to eventually be disposed of."

Another growl. "Says you. But either way, I've been here, digging through the memories hidden in the echoes of the Strix. And I have images that will interest you."

Before Jack could say anything, the Ripper summoned up another image. Not a memory from Viktor or Julias, but Elaine.

"Don't," Elaine said, eyes growing wide as she realized what was happening. "Don't."

But the Ripper just laughed, and the Beast creature hovered out of the way so they could see what he wanted them to see. Elaine, naked, covered head to toe in blood. She was in a hut, some sort of wooden cottage or something, and there were three corpses around her, two men, one woman. One of the men was in her arms, Elaine sucking the man dry, her arms wrapped around his chest and holding him to her.

Her eyes were wide and crazed, like a hungry, rabid animal.

Elaine dismissed the image with a swing of the arm. "This isn't--"

"Oh it's very real. The Strix gift still flowed through your veins back then, and any moment where you brought me out, the memories are vivid. Would you like to see another?"

"I--"

The Ripper didn't wait. It pulled up another image, with a similar result. Except this time, there were two people, a man and woman, and Elaine was currently in the process of drinking the man mid sex, with the woman behind her, pressed against her back lovingly. Another wooden home from easily nearly five hundred years ago.

The image fast forwarded quickly, showing the violence as a rapid display of carnage. Elaine, ripping the man's throat open with her teeth, still mid sex. The woman screaming in shock. Wolves, literal wolves, breaking into the house. Wolves eating the woman alive.

Meal complete, Elaine stood up, smiling widely as the dying man's fresh blood dripped down her jaw, neck, and her naked body.

Jack looked away. "She got rid of the curse for a reason, Ripper. You're not showing us anything we don't already know, or will fucking sway us about anything." A peek Elaine's way showed stubborn defiance, but he recognized the guilt he saw last time they talked, when she explained some of her past to him. To have it rubbed in her face by someone as fucked up as the curse, must have fucking sucked.

Jack knew the feelings, too. He knew what it'd been like to have fucked up, thoroughly twisted thoughts running through his mind. The things he wanted to do to Angela would have landed him in a psych ward as much as a prison, if he'd been human.

"Then how about this," the Ripper said.

The image swirled around Jack, but not all that much. Still some sort of wood building, but no snow outside. Elaine gone, wolves gone, corpses gone. No, wait, Elaine was there again, in bed, with another woman, and Susanna.

Elaine gasped. This was Susanna's memory. Or was it Elaine's, from the moment of her embrace?

"There she is. The first vampire to hold me." The swirling mass of black smoke drifted over top now, and pointed down at the hallucination that surrounded Jack with a myriad of his flowing claws. "Look at her. Tiny, and unassuming. How'd she seduce you?"

The elder Ventrue snarled. "That does not matter."

"Uh huh." Laughing, the curse pointed again, this time at the man watching them from the side of the room. The Sanctified vampire. "Recognize him?"

Elaine shook her head. Of course she couldn't recognize the face, considering it was blurry.

"I suppose you can't sharpen the memory," she said.

"Nah. Sorry. Reaching across five centuries of time, through memories that have echoed in the veins of the Strix gift, isn't exactly easy. Moments where I came to the surface, moments where I was called, used, or where my beloved Beast was called, those are moments I remember. But even then, five hundred years is too damn long to keep the memory crisp." He chuckled again. "With time, and maybe a little help from a smart dragon with some crazy rituals on her side, I might be able to recall more."

"If..."

The Ripper shrugged. Considering he was currently a giant hovering ball of black smoke filled with swirling, disappearing and reappearing feathers and claws and beaks and fangs, shrugging looked weird as fuck.

"You know what I want, old bitch. You know I want control of Jack's body. I want it, the body, the mind, the soul. I want it all, and I want it now." Oh fucking god he even sang it to the tune. "But if you're not willing to help me with that, then tell me about the ritual you used to destroy the strand of me that lived inside you?"

"Tools do not live."

Another cackle. "I'm not a tool. Christ, I sound like a broken record."

But all he earned was another snarl from Elaine. "You can't conjure up the memory of how I removed my curse?"

"Can't remember things I wasn't there for. This strand of me split off from you when you sired Viktor. But if you come over here," he gestured to the floor near Jack, by where Susanna, Elaine, and the third woman were having sex on the bed, "I can delve into your memories on my own. Might be able to sharpen up some of these blurry images, too. Maybe even remember some names we've both forgotten."

"I think not."

"You wanted to talk to me. You wanted to see what I'd be willing to share. I'm willing to share a lot, if you're willing to tell me -- or show me -- what you did to remove your gift. I figured you committed diablerie, but what I need are the details."

"You will learn of it eventually, but not until it is too late to do anything about it."

The Ripper laughed. "Nice bluff. If you remembered exactly what you did, you'd have shared it with Jack by now."

"Not everyone is as eager to embrace Amaranth as you, vile creature. When Jack is freed of you, it will not be over the ashes of other Kindred. I will not have my childe suffer as I suffered."

Jack blinked at Elaine. That sounded altruistic, and much as he knew Elaine could just be acting for the Ripper's benefit, there was something about this place, this metaphor room, this endless white space in his skull, that stripped away a lot of the bullshit. He believed her.

With an annoyed growl, the Ripper slashed away the image, and Jack ducked as the Beast's claws sliced right through him. They passed through him like knives cutting through fog, thank god.

The projection faded, but another replaced it almost immediately. Oh fuck not this one. Jack stepped away from it, but the metaphor room didn't react to his feet on the ground. Efforts to walk away didn't do shit, and he stopped trying as the image around them grew, and grew, until they were in blackness.

Susanna, on her knees, with a vampire in torpor beside her. A huge, withered tree, deep underground. And glowing yellow eyes in the darkness, a dozen of them at least, bodies hidden in the black around the tree branches.

"You forsook their gift, vampire. But I have a shred of a few memories I haven't shown Jack, a few things I'm sure would be of use to you."

Elaine paced the canyon as she stared at the tree, and what it represented. Answers. To someone like Jack, he was happy to leave dark dirty secrets to die in black caves that meant nothing but death. But to a dragon, answers to something like how or what or why the Strix did anything was borderline existential. After all the history she had with the curse, and now the fuzzy memories she had of it teasing her, combined with the Ripper taunting her with power she didn't know she'd given up, Jack couldn't blame her for staring with hungry eyes at the image the Ripper conjured.

"And if I cannot remember the details of the ritual I used?"

"Then do what you can to help me take over this body. Get rid of the necklace, and keep the Prince and her boring sheriff out of my way. Do that, and I'll show you more than I showed Jack. I'll show you what it was like in Susanna's mind, when she first used the curse, when she first used me, when I was free. I'll show you everything I know about how she learned about the Strix, how she knew where to go, what to do, everything." Two arms of black mist erupted from the Beast's sides, and crashed into the ground hard enough the entire endlessness around them shook, shattering the image. It decayed into nothingness around them. "All yours! If you give me what I want. And I want my freedom."

Jack gulped as he stared up at the monster, before looking back to Elaine. If she either gave the curse information about how Elaine got rid of her curse, likely allowing the Ripper to prevent such a thing from happening to him, the curse would help her. Or, if she helped the Ripper take over Jack permanently, he'd help her. Either way, Jack would lose the battle for his body, and probably switch places with the Ripper, a voice with no control in his head, while the Ripper got to do whatever the fuck he wanted.

Elaine looked at the curse, the Beast it infected and controlled, and then looked to Jack. They met eyes for a bit, neither of them looking away, and Elaine gave him a small smile and nod.

"I did not begin this ritual to barter with you, curse. I am here, to understand my enemy. And now I do. You are no bastion of ancient power. You are a child, a cruel and sick thing without a shred of humanity, wielding power you do not deserve. Strix indeed. Any bargain we made would be tainted. The moment you had your freedom, you would rain destruction on everything around you, including me." Elaine swiped an arm through the air. "And besides, the conversation was mostly a distraction while the ritual took hold."

"What are--" The Ripper sucked in a snarling breath as he stared across the canyon.

Chains snapped out from Elaine's side of the ravine, and crashed into and over the curse. The Ripper's snarl turned into an ear piercing shriek of fury, and Jack covered his ears as he watched the giant thing come crashing to the white floor. More chains snapped out, more and more, crossing the uncrossable canyon, and wrapping around the creature.

The Ripper roared and shrieked. Any attempts at words were nothing more than garbled curses mixed with guttural sounds.

"Holy shit," Jack said. "You bound it?"

"Only for the moment." Sighing, Elaine reached behind her, and pulled out her ritual book from nowhere. Metaphor room, right. "This ritual you sit within, Jack my childe, can be used to suppress the Beast in draugr, if only momentarily. At great cost to the caster, I might add. But it should suffice long enough for my purposes."

Jack winced as he tried to hear her over the sounds of the Ripper screaming. "Uh, purpose? I thought you wanted to have a chat with the curse?"

"That was part of my purpose. And now for the other part."

"I didn't agree to--"

"Of course you did not." Elaine looked down at her book held in one hand, while her other hand pointed out at the curse. The chains had come out of nowhere before, but now that she had the book in hand, the chains were coming out of it now. "Rest assured, this will be of no issue to you, Jack."

Jack eyed his great grandsire, but said nothing. The fuck could he do? She was on the other side of the canyon, and far as he could tell, the only way she was able to do anything across it, was cause Jack was currently sitting in the middle of a fucking ritual circle, powered by her vitae and her weird book. If it wasn't for the Ripper, Jack doubted he'd even be consciously aware of any of the shit that was happening in his skull.

Another chain shot out from the book, this one tipped with a spike. It didn't surround and tie up the curse like the others. It sank right into the giant pile of black smoke's flank, and ripped out a chunk of it. Again, the curse screamed.

And then it was done. Elaine smiled, closed the book, and the dream ended. The screaming disappeared, she disappeared, and Jack disappeared. It all went away like someone blowing out the candle in an otherwise pitch black room.

Jack opened his eyes. Back in his mansion, in the basement. Back with Elaine. Groaning, Jack tried to stand up. No good, his body didn't want to listen, as if he was human again and had just gone back to the gym for the first time in years.

"Elaine, the fuck did you--"

Elaine stumbled back, dropped her book, and almost crashed into a wall. Only a snap of her left hand stopped her skull from getting cracked like an egg. She didn't use her right hand, cause it was holding something.

A tiny vial. He saw only a glimpse of it before it disappeared between her fingers.

"Elaine." After another groan, he forced himself up to his feet, driving vitae into his limbs. "You took something from the curse."

Elaine peeked over her shoulder at him, and stumbling even worse than he was, she gave him a small grin before she grabbed her purse and put the vial inside.

"Do not think me so altruistic I will risk my life for zero gain, childe of mine."

"Thought the gain was learning more about the curse, Susanna, and the Strix."

"I doubted the curse would ever share such knowledge. If I gained it, then I would be a terribly happy dragon, but I knew I would not. Instead, I intended to acquire some of its vitae."

"Its vitae?"

"When the curse takes control of you, it fills you, yes? Dominates every inch of you, and alters your vitae."

Jack walked over to her, eying her closely with each step. "Yeah."

"I had two choices, if I wished to acquire some of that vitae. Wait for you to lose control to the curse, and somehow acquire vitae from it in some ridiculous battle that could very well spell my doom. Or, extract it via ritual."

"Extract it? How the fuck does that work?"

"In the same manner Dominate allows us to penetrate the minds of others with merely eye contact."

"Magic."

"Precisely. Though far be it from a dragon to use such an archaic term." Chuckling, her own energy returning, she scooped the book back up, and motioned for Jack to follow her.

Jack wasn't so keen on following her, considering she'd lied to him about the ritual. But then again, she had to lie, cause the Ripper heard everything they said. Couldn't exactly plot behind his back when he got to eavesdrop on everything.

"You really do whatever you wanna do, don't you?"

"Of course. It is the prerogative of elders."

"Uh huh." Rolling his eyes, he followed after her as she walked up the stairs. He looked behind him at the ritual circle, and how the marks in the floor were now black, as if they'd been burned to ash. Did all rituals do that, or just ones that dealt with horrible shit like Strix curses?