My Little Ventrue Pt. 10 Ch. 16

~~Jack~~

Oh fucking shit.

He stared up at Antoinette, and how she dangled over Mary's claws, bent backward like a corpse stuck on a pike, skewered up the back. Sabrina's knife had been unbelievably painful, like fire, somehow made of ice, slicing through flesh like a fucking lightsaber. But Mary's claws looked a thousand times worse, and they held Antoinette up over Mary's head, ready to pull her in half. Or cut her in half.

But Jacob wasn't that much of an asshole. Anyone else would have been, considering Antoinette had been about to kill him. But for some reason, the fucker about to destroy the world, wanted them alive to see it. To rub it in their faces when it worked? If it did, life and death wouldn't be a thing anymore, and everyone, alive or dead, would be together anyway. Maybe it'd take a while for it to happen? Maybe Jacob wasn't entirely convinced it'd be that simple?

Or maybe, he just didn't want them to have to die first. Dying sucked. Jack could attest to that. And Jacob had saved them on a couple occasions, for absolutely no other reason, than what he'd said. He liked Jack, and the rest of them.

"Please," Jack said, "don't... don't hurt her."

Mary looked at him, eyes twisting down on the outer corners with almost cartoony exaggeration. She was tormented by what she was being forced to do.

"I'm trying not to! B-But Black Blood, he's... controlling... me..." The ghost looked down, body shivering. And Antoinette, still hanging over her, body limp and paralyzed, managed to turn her head enough to look to Jack. A tiny hint of shame showed through, and Jack returned the same. They'd failed.

Jacob waved a hand, and the distorting invisible walls disappeared, allowing everyone to see what was what again. Elders didn't like showing their strongest powers. They were better off as secrets, to be used on people that wouldn't live to talk about them. People knew masters of Obfuscate could do some really weird shit with distorting reality, if they had the chance to soak an area with their blood, but Jack had never considered something as extreme as invisible walls that warped perception, like some really fucked up mirror maze. That, was a scary thing to get trapped in, and Antoinette had still managed to beat him.

With a hissing whimper, Mary's ghost hovered over to the edge of the circle of standing stones, by the red barrier. With a little more force than was necessary, no doubt at Black Blood's silent command, she threw Antoinette through the barrier, and Sándor, eyes as stoic as ever, caught her with his one good arm, and bit down his need to grunt in pain. His body was still fucked up, too.

Slowly, Jack set his one eye on Elaine, and stared at her as hard as he could. She met his gaze for a moment before looking away, and rubbing her arm where Daniel had managed to nearly cut it off.

Sure enough, Daniel emerged, on the outside of the barrier. Soaked head to toe in not only the blood of the crazy flesh tunnel they'd come through, but also Mark's blood, the Mekhet limped around the barrier until he came to stand beside Sándor and Beatrice. He helped the gargoyle with the Prince, and they set her down on her feet. She tried to stand, but fumbled, and Daniel slipped under her arm to help her.

Jack looked to the crowd, and they all looked to him. No one had to say it. It was plastered on their faces. They'd failed, and now Jacob was going to start the apocalypse.

Snarling, Jack pulled against the invisible chains holding him. He pulled harder, and harder. He pulled until he felt his vitae pulse in his body and his bones threaten to break. But the ritual circle was made with his own blood, and he didn't need to be an ancient dragon of the Ordo Dracul to guess that meant it was unbreakable to him.

"Shame Mark died," Jacob said, one hand clutched to the side of his fucked up throat. "I suppose the lot of you thought he was gross? Which, I mean, he kinda was, but that was his Horror's fault, not him. The guy was loyal to Azamel, and has lost other people, too." Before Jack or anyone else could call him out, Jacob threw up a hand and shook his head. "Never mind. I'm wasting my breath."

"You okay?" Jack's mom came up to Jacob and peeked at his neck. Exposed flesh showed some Kindred blood pulsing within.

"I'll be fine. I have to finish this ritual, and it's going to take a bit."

"And... and Mary?"

"I am truly sorry," Black Blood said, and he weaved a finger over Mary's ghost. The chains that bound her reappeared, coiled around her, and the ghost settled back on the wet stone floor. "My options were limited."

"I gotta admit," the old Nosferatu said as he clucked his tongue once as he looked through the red barrier at the watching crowd, "you almost had me, old friend."

Antoinette sneered, but she didn't have the energy to put the ice cold glare in it Jack would have expected. Mary's claws had really, really fucked her up.

Sam leaned in and nudged her cheek against Jacob's shoulder.

"You--"

"Go. I'll be fine." He returned the lean to give her a quick kiss on the cheek again before nodding toward Mary's ghost.

Jack's mom watched Jacob for a few seconds longer than she needed too. He recognized that look. It was the look she gave his dad when she was worried about him, when he tried to do the manly thing and not talk about how much he was hurting about whatever. But Mary's sniffles called her, and her mom settled down in the shallow water beside her.

She got on her knees and set Mary's head on her legs, before peeking back up to Jacob's back as the man worked, and then to Jack. Something had changed. Her expression, her body language, the way she looked at Jacob's back as she ran her fingers through Mary's hair. Mary had whispered something to her earlier, but in all the chaos, Jack didn't have a fucking clue what. Their mom had mentioned their dad to Mary's ghost, so maybe something to do with him?

To everyone watching, it probably looked like his mom had betrayed them, had become Jacob's partner in crime, and doomed them all to Armageddon. Jack knew better. His mom was a lot of things, willful and determined, and soft and loving, but she was not a quick thinker. She didn't understand what was happening, the scale of things, what Jacob and Black Blood were actually about to do, what it meant for everyone and everything. She just wanted everyone to be together, and Jacob, a man she loved, was giving her a way to make that happen. She'd had maybe five hours to wrap her mind around the fucking insanity of it all, and he knew his mom, it'd take her a lot longer than that to process what was happening.

He couldn't hate her for that. He could be super pissed at her, like he'd been a thousand times before for her god damn fucking stupidity and utter inability to use her god damn head. But not hate her.

Jack took a deep, useless breath, hardened his gaze on his mother, and channeled that frustration until he could stomach the shittiness of what he was about to do. No point in trying to Dominate Jacob, or Elaine. It'd take way too long to Dominate one, and the other would intervene, and that was assuming it was even possible, tired as was. He couldn't even try it on Black Blood or Mary's ghost, and Mark was dead. He had one option.

She looked at him. A moment of eye contact was all he needed. He reached out for his mom's mind, and... got absolutely nowhere. He frowned down at the ritual circle, and tried again. But got nowhere. The ritual circle was blocking him.

He reached down for the cellar in his mind, the chains he'd summoned to hold down the curse, and tried to undo them. It didn't work. It was like he was wearing the necklace again. His Beast was out of his reach.

He snapped his glare to Elaine, and she nodded slowly, reading his thoughts and confirming. She was an Architect of Terror, a dragon who'd studied the Beast and how to manipulate it for literal centuries. It was her ritual circle, and he knew just how she'd made it.

"Black Blood," Jacob said. "Do the ritual now. I still need time, and I don't want that Strix curse to be a problem in the new world. Who knows what sort of shit it'll be able to do when the barriers are all gone."

As Elaine approached Jack, her hint of a grin faded, replaced with something heavy and somber as she looked at him.

"So this is what you wanted my blood for?" Jack asked. "You put me through that other ritual to get some curse-infused blood or whatever, so you can get this ritual to work?"

"Indeed. Like this, you are bound, and the ritual can force the curse to respond. It would not be necessary if you cooperated." She frowned at him as she looked down, and checked the dozens of red symbols drawn into the floor, still pushing the black water away. Daniel had done a number on her, more than Jack had noticed before. Several stab wounds and gashes were on her back, and a few more in her stomach and legs. Her suit was a mess, and several of the gashes were deep enough to expose hints of bone. Ventrue were hard to damage without fire or crazy shit like werewolf claws, but Daniel had thoroughly hurt her with nothing more than a regular sword. She was in worse condition than Jacob.

"You'll excuse me if I don't exactly trust a god of the dead," Jack said.

"Then you understand little," Black Blood said, and chuckled as he set his white, burning gaze on him.

The giant loomed in closer, and reached out with one of his hands. The towering limb covered the air over Jack, huge palm of bone bigger than Jack's whole body, and it blocked out what little light came from the ceiling above. The maelstrom of ghosts overhead continued to howl and groan, but as the giant god summoned whatever magic he was going to use, the other ghost weren't needed, or maybe he couldn't use them for this. They stayed where they were.

"Just relax," Elaine said, and she came in closer until she was standing only a foot in front of him, "and let Black Blood remove the curse."

"I..."

Elaine winked at him.

He eyed her, and did his best to run through the thousand possibilities of what that wink meant. And there was most definitely a thousand things. The fuck was she scheming?

He didn't get much longer to think about it. Black Blood's hand glowed with the same dark he'd used to summon his ghosts before, and while no ghosts came down to join him, the red lines of the ritual circle underneath Jack lit up like fire. A rush of invisible energy hit him, more crackling nothingness down deep in the bones that defied the senses. Beast instincts told him it was supernatural, but he doubted he'd need a Beast to pick up on that. It was the same sort of chill you felt when walking past a graveyard at night, and you just knew it was the sort of night to walk on the other side of the street. Times a million.

Everything faded away. The red barrier, his worried lover, Jacob etching more symbols into the standing stones, his mom and his sister's ghost, and Elaine staring him in the eye with an expression he couldn't quite place. All gone, replaced with the white brain zone he'd grown to loathe.

Jack looked at himself. Surprisingly not naked, and wearing a suit. Both eyes again, too. Not that stereoscopic vision meant much in an endless plane of mental metaphors his brain concocted to understand the weird, mystical, magical strangeness of what-the-fuck-ever.

The white plane didn't last. Black clouds cut in from everywhere, rumbling and heavy, until Jack had to cover his ears. More and more of them appeared, carried on winds that thankfully cut well above his head, but left him staring up at a hurricane.

For a second, Jack figured the fucker would descend from them like some angel of death. But, nope, Black Blood came up from the ground, and as he did, the white endless turned into black oblivion instead. Black water inched its way up Jack's feet until it stopped at his ankles, before it opened up into an enormous whirlpool in front of him. Naturally, the giant asshole came up out of it, a colossal black skeleton with a skull big enough to eat Jack in one bite. Up and up until his entire torso stuck out of the whirlpool, and his two hands rested on the black water around Jack.

This time, no great canyon separated them. And that was terrifying.

"Where is the curse?" Black Blood asked.

Jack snarled.

Sighing, Black Blood shook his head. "I am not your enemy."

"Says you."

The god of the dead chuckled and gestured around at nothing.

"You are so utterly convinced, after everything that's happened?" In a one-on-one, the weird, alien, harsh and guttural accent was even more scary. Jack kind of missed the Southern accent.

"I'm convinced you're willing to do whatever it takes to achieve your dream."

"And the times I saved your life?"

Jack ground his teeth. "Just because you're not as bad as you seem, doesn't mean you're in the clear to break the world."

Unfortunately, time passed slowly in the weird brain space. If Black Blood wanted to spend the next twenty minutes giving a speech, he could.

"Where is the curse?" he asked again. Apparently he didn't intend to give another rant about his godly, unknowable intentions.

"Locked up."

Black Blood tilted his skull to the side. "Without your necklace to help you?"

"Yeah. Imagine that."

"Impressive. Now, bring us to it."

"No."

The god of corpses laughed. "Elaine's ritual gives me the power to force the situation, little vampire." And with a wave of his hand, Black Blood made that blatant. The endless black that penetrated and permeated Jack's brain shot away, except it wasn't the environment that moved away from them a hundred miles an hour, it was Jack and Black Blood. No momentum or inertia, but Jack still fell over as his eyes told him he damn well should have, with how fast everything ripped aside.

A forest replaced his surroundings, dark and creepy, with the quiet chirping of insects in the background. A moon overhead lit the forest, but it was weak, just like the lighting in the Great Below. A harsh breeze cut along every so often, and each time it brought a howl with it, no doubt finding some trees to funnel through to create the eerie noise.

Behind Jack, was the abandoned cabin, the one he'd locked the curse under.

"I believe I have seen this movie," Black Blood said. His giant skeleton torso still stuck out from a big black whirlpool, except now it was in the middle of Jack's memory, in front of him and not too far from the old cabin. Somehow, the black ooze didn't so much as touch or interact with the forest as it overlaid it, kind of like how the Begotten and their Horrors looked when doing their monster stuff outside the dream world.

"You've seen--Jacob."

"He adores this movie." Black Blood laughed, and gestured to the cabin. "You used the memory to lock up the curse. Most impressive."

Ah shit. It was so much easier to think of Jacob as some sort of big, soulless enemy to beat, than as a dude who watched movies. Good movies, evidently.

"Yeah well, the Ripper killed two people and he was going to kill more. I wouldn't let him."

"Then be happy I am removing it." Sighing, Black Blood shook his head and gestured to Jack with a hand, snaking it between the large forest trees to do it. "If you had let me take the curse from you, all those months ago, no one--"

"Would have died? Yeah, and you'd have another tool to bring about your utopia. Gonna use it to rule?"

"There will be nothing to rule, when all are together in all ways."

"You sound like a brainwashed cult member."

"And you are an ignorant insect. What use is there in convincing you." Black Blood leaned in closer, until his black teeth were within punching distance. "Go, release the curse from its prison. I will extract it, and you will be eternally grateful."

"Fuck you."

"I. Said. Go."

"F--"

Black Blood's hand snapped out, and grabbed Jack. Cold and brutal, the bones of the god of the dead squeezed on him, and Jack froze; not that he could move if he wanted to. Black Blood, or Mictawhatever, stared at him with dots of white flame in his eye sockets, and he squeezed harder, forcing Jack to groan as the bastard compressed his ribcage and lungs.

"Elaine's ritual was drawn with your vitae, and vitae infused with the curse's vitae. It allows me full access to your mind, vampire. You could fight me, and resist me, but all it would do is force me to rip your conscious mind into ribbons to reach my goal." He came in closer, until his teeth were almost hitting Jack's face. "I do not know how such damage to your mind will affect you in the new world. There are many unknowns. Your mother would prefer you intact to see it, as would Jacob."

Jack tried to say something, but Black Blood didn't ease up. The giant skeleton squeezed harder again, and Jack gargled on the few drops of air left in his metaphorical lungs. Metaphors could, apparently, be very painful.

"Now, go, and bring me my new prisoner." Black Blood tossed him back, and Jack crashed into the front door behind him.

The door swung open, and Jack rolled through the dirty old cabin, before hitting the rug and sliding it across the shitty wooden floor. Eventually he came to a stop, lying on his back, and he stared up at the ceiling as his groaned. He was screwed.

Sighing, he looked over to the cellar door, where the curse still was. The door pushed up from the floor half a dozen inches so the Ripper bulged underneath it, trying to break the chains that held the old wooden door down. Jack had to let him out. He didn't want to, but he had to.

Christ, they really had failed.

Jack got up, and stood in the doorway of the cabin. "Gimme a minute," he said to Black Blood.

Black Blood rumbled, but said nothing as he nodded. Okay, Jack had a minute.

He closed the door to the cabin, and squatted down in front of the cellar door.

"I imagine you've seen everything that's happened?" Since the real world was moving at a fraction of speed as the craziness going on in his head, now was a decent time for a little chat, before the end.

The Ripper let out a rumble of his own, all too similar to Black Blood's. Some of his shadowy tentacles reached out from under the cellar door, and they could have grabbed Jack, but it was all a metaphor. Jack was safe until the door's chains were broken, or undone.

"You failed," the Ripper said.

"Yeah, apparently. Didn't expect the red barrier." Jack threw up his hands. "We didn't expect any of this! The trap. Sabrina. The fucking red barrier, or Black Blood being able to touch ghosts, or this fucking ritual circle I'm trapped in."

"Pathetic."

"Oh shut the fuck up. Don't act like you could have done better. This fucking ritual"--he gestured to the cabin's front door and the giant death god waiting on the other side of it--"is locking you down just as much as it is me."

A heavy rumble from the cellar door was all the confirmation Jack needed.

"You screwed up," the Ripper said, "trusting Elaine and letting her draw your blood. Our blood."

"Yeah, I'm starting to think that. Except..."

"Except what?"

"She winked at me."

The giant creature trapped in the cellar laughed. "She winks at you all the time, dumbass."

"This was different. She was trying to tell me something."

"Something like 'ha, I win!'?"

Jack threw the giant creature of smoke a glare. "What the fuck is your problem?"

"What sort of useless, idiotic question is that?"

"I want to know, what your problem is! Why, in the ever living fuck, do you want everyone to suffer? I don't care who are you, what you are, where you came from, any of it. No one, nothing, wants other people to suffer, just for suffering's sake."

The creature laughed. "You have no idea how satisfying it is, how much it completes me, to--"

"I don't buy it. No one just, gets off, on being a fucking psycho killer. Except, you know, psycho killers. But I'm not a psycho killer, I know that, and whatever you are, you might be some sort of manifestation of my inner desires. And for some fucking reason, that also includes visceral murder? No. That's not right. I'm not like that."