Thirst Ch. 10

Monroe Carter, whose name rhymes with martyr, was a cold-forged steel torch in the night, beaten and unyielding against an icy anvil. She'd stood against the worst of her kind, and varieties of nightmarish Damned, and every time she'd come out on top.

Only two sorts of storm could dim her amber-bright unflame, or bring her down from her roost overseeing the chaotic seethe of her Revolution...one of those was the morose downpour of heartbreak, which fortunately she'd been spared as of late.

The other was the whipping, lashing squall of failure.

She wasn't sure which was a less tolerable scourge, but one thing was certain: failure, in this game played by the All Night Society, was a storm that threatened to tear the very floor and foundations of all her work out from under her feet. As the Syndicate's members billowed and raged at her under the crackling lights that illuminated the old Canton-Mills Union House, long since abandoned to vagrants and now the thirsty Dead, let it buffet her in stoic stride.

The Beast prowling in her heart's cage was terrified, and to listen to its primitive, stupid impulses would set this house of fangs tumbling around her in stabbing chaos.

" - had no idea what you were going up against Carter, you could have sent one of us after it to get a good look - "

I couldn't have done that Corra, because my best spy is already tailing Silent Yan and I can't break his cover. She's gotten too close to us.

" - only took three members with you?! Ten of us could have taken it, twenty, but now Will is dead because of YOU - "

That wouldn't have worked, Manny, it escaped us faster than we could pursue when I brought more than three. It's cunning.

" - was my best friend, how could you?! William wasn't a soldier but you used him like one and now and this is all that remains?! Why Carter?!"

Because, the rest of you are even less effective as soldiers...you're not hunters, you're not warriors, this was the best I could do.

All the while, in the back of the hall, drooping like a bedraggled kitten dragged in from the rain, Little Samara watched her with apologetic eyes. Downcast, her shoulders slumped, the teenaged Vampire kept mouthing the words I'm sorry, I'm sorry as if that would change anything; it didn't alter the duty Monroe had to every member of the Syndicate. It wasn't Sam's fault.

The blame rested entirely upon her shoulders, and she deserved this public castigation. Monroe forced herself to take them in, all of them individually. Of the thirty or so members of the Syndicate who'd gathered here tonight, they were closer to twenty nine than they had been in months, for William had met Final Death and Vorath was missing his left arm - perhaps forever. Corra, at the least, had come away from their failed monster hunt unscathed but even her perfectly groomed, statuesque figure seemed curled inward...disturbed by the traumatic brush with Final Death.

In her palms, she held William's fangs, the only thing that remained after their encounter with the Shrike. The memory played beneath the icy mirror of her consciousness, like a horror movie spread across the surface of a frozen pond and she forced herself to stare outward rather than confront it all again.

She knew what she had to say; Monroe Carter just wasn't sure if she could weather what came next. "I have failed. I have failed ," she repeated in a voice loud enough to quell them, the looming quality of her presence far taller than her 5'4". The admission was not one that was often made even privately between Kindred, let alone before a covenant; that set them looking at each other, as if questioning whether they'd really heard those three words.

"I did not know the thing we were hunting, and I chased it down with a hope for a quick resolution...for is that not how I have attended to every single petition you have placed before me?" she reminded them, thinking quickly before resistance to her self-admonishment could build among the turmoil of their linked, undead psyches.

"Sherman," Monroe leaned into the crowd standing in front of her bare, Spartan lectern, closing her fingers around the fangs in her palm stabbing into her cold flesh, "when the Prinz went down, how long before I swam down there myself and pried you out?"

The massive Gangrel's drawn lips tightened beneath the scraggle of his beard, crossing his pillar-dense arms over his broad, pallid chest. "She went down at o-nine hundred and thirty two, you had me out before midnight," he acquiesced with a bass rumble.

Her amber gaze raked across the room, quickly choosing her next victory from the little catalog she'd indexed in her mind, for just such an occasion where she needed to remind them that they carried on through the nights thanks to her interventions.

"Harlowe," she called out to the bent, miserable looking old man standing near Nettletongue, peevishly grimacing at her, "when the See came calling for you to answer for your apostasy, what were they met by?"

That scowl drifted slowly away like smoke in a breeze, rubbing at the snub of his nose with a yellow rubber work glove. "You, and half the Syndicate, daring the Carnifex to try somethin'."

"And did he?" Monroe pressed.

"...he turned tail, ain't never came back."

Carter reverently set William's fangs upon the lectern and straightened with a prideful stare, challenging those who'd followed her this far. "When you all called for me to protect you from Final Death, to guard your secrets, and to avenge your fallen, I awakened my Sire and drained her heart's blood to inscribe our laws. I pressed the paper myself from Morgan Keirow's ashes."

All of these things were true; not a single one of them could have pulled it off, not like she did with her fast wheeling and dealing, her last-minute compromises and her uncanny ability to charm monsters. "Still, I have failed you," she reminded them, with a tactful show of humility.

"So what are you going to do about it, Carter?" Nettletongue hissed, her forked tongue darting between her fangs - the crowd didn't know that Monroe had coached the unshakably loyal, disturbing girl to ask just this question on just that cue.

Perfect timing , she thought; she'd regained some measure of control over them - where once they'd been a gallery of resentment and horror writ across bloodthirsty, dead faces all caterwauling her way, now they were reminded of the supporting role she'd played in all their Requiems. What Kindred could honestly say that about another, that she'd done something for them? She hadn't even asked anything of them in return except for their cooperation; she didn't bask in any luxury greater than the others, she didn't command some special privilege.

There was the Cause, and the Cause was to simply make their individual lives more bearable...but no matter how important that was to her, a simpler truth motivated this whole struggle:

At her twisted, corrupted core, past the flickering echoes of her human identity, she delighted in the control...in the thrill of watching them rise to her battlecry, the power to target the combined wrath and will of almost three dozen Vampires...and someday they would stake every member of the Overseer Council and dump them into the bayous.

"I am going to protect the Syndicate's members," she stated bluntly. "I will take care of the Shrike myself, without putting any of the rest of you in harm's way."

That, in itself, prompted an outburst from the audience - an outrageous proposition for their leader to put herself in harm's way without any support, and not motivated out of altruism. She knew, they knew, that without her the Syndicate was as a serpent missing its head - lashing about in grand but harmless fashion, spraying itself about messily. Every moment calculated, she let them make their irate sounds.

"You think you can go up against it alone?! You took three Kindred out there and barely two of you make it back whole - "

How different a song you sing now; you're still no warrior, no enforcer. You'd simply drag me down with your weakness...and that's okay. I can carry it.

"Why isn't the committee doing something about this?! We pay tithe after tithe so they can protect us, why don't they?!"

You think that's the purpose of a tithe? Were you Embraced yesterday, Jasper White?

"I SEE YOU, CHILDE."

If the corpse she wore could have frozen further she'd have become a pillar of solid mercury. What was that?

Monroe had never experienced something like this, and for a moment her attention was pulled from the heckling of her Syndicate in search of where that feeling originated, for the words were experienced rather than heard over the shouting voices filling the Union House.

It felt like dozens of grasping, shrunken hands running up a windowpane, or a cold wind from the throat of a dead world. She sought every shadow for treason, listened for a heartbeat that didn't belong but saw only cobwebs and dust. Monroe's attention raked across her Syndicate, those with whom she'd exchanged blood covenant.

Corra, shining black in leather, hissing mad at what she'd suffered in following Monroe on that ill-fated ambush but...little more than Corra

Melinda, dressed in a black funerary gown, mourning William's loss, holding Little John close in her arms as they stared up at her with resentment.

Samara, covering her face with her hands and shaking her head, no doubt traumatized by what was happening to Monroe...she'd given Sam sanctuary, tried her best to help her with a problem she didn't fully understand or was prepared for, and...

...was she laughing at her...? Were they all laughing at her?!

The Beast reared against the cage of her heart, screaming in her own tortured voice. USE HIM! SAVE THEM FROM THE SHRIKE, USE HIM!

The unvoice forgotten, she reached for the gavel she'd never had cause to swing...and instead picked up William's fangs, and tightened her fist around them, stabbing the points into her flesh. The raucous, shouting crowd progressively grew quieter as they saw her Vitae drip from her clenched fingers, rhythmically patting against a sound block. It flowed in twin ribbons down the front of her lectern, forming a small pool on the dirty floor before them all.

"Article Two," she called in a somber tone.

"The Syndicate avenges its own. " The murmured response rose from the crowd like ripples in a wheat field.

USE HIM!

"I have proven myself to you before, countless times," Monroe declared in a clarion voice that was far more confident than she felt, "so will I prove myself again to you, as many times as it takes for you to hold the line...because you know as well as any, that at the first sign of a crack the vermin enthralled to our good Lords and Ladies will squirm in to fill them, and they'll poison this house."

In their rational minds, seated alongside Beasts that haunted their souls just like Monroe's, they knew this to be true, and they knew that the only one to have ever even tried to attend to their sorrows was the one standing there at the lectern. She was their only guiding light; it was, of course, their nature to snap at her fingers, to castigate her as an unruly, undead mob might.

What other choice did they have?

Not a one of them left satisfied that night. Little Sam hung back after the rest had dispersed back to their feeding grounds, to their disturbing nightly activities and...whatever it was that they all did to give meaning to their unnatural existences. She was wearing that same heavy, dark green overcoat she favored, her bedraggled brown hair somehow even more out of place than usual. Monroe could sense the guilt rolling off her like mist on the Gulf, and while she certainly held no resentment toward the poor waif, she felt guilt sour in her stomach like bad blood. Monroe watched her with raven's stillness.

"Carter," the poor little Gangrel wheezed, downcast and sullen like she'd stepped out of pouring rain. "You don't gotta do this...I can jump ship, I can head to another town." She curled in on herself at the Brujah's approach - Monroe was reminded of a shame-stricken, featherless little bird of some sort, and she took the girl's hand in her own blood-streaked one, holding William's fangs between them.

"This is my fault...if I was stronger, or could just make it better, William wouldn't..." Monroe shushed her, and together they simply stood there, the pair of them, holding the kind, strong Kindred's remains. Neither said a thing for the passing of a few minutes.

"Funny, isn't it...Nosferatu like him, they got it bad, all twisted on the outside." Carter opened her palm, and they both gazed at William. "Most of 'em, they're just as bad as the rest of us Sam, but Will..."

"He gave me a card every year on my birthday." Sam looked like she was on the edge of crying, her face all scrunched up and miserable. "I kept every one of them, hung them up...nobody ever got me anything for my birthday, but he did...and Monroe, he...made them all by hand."

...maybe it's because he was one of the good ones that he was taken, Samara. Maybe he was good enough to have earned release from this horrible fate inflicted upon us by uncaring monsters - those same ancient horrors we are destined to become, should we make it. William never once doubted me. He never once thought I couldn't advance the Cause, he just gave whatever was asked; did I ever even thank him? Did I just use and break him like a tool - like the Overseers do to us?

Monroe didn't say any of that, for such sentiment went against her station and wouldn't hearten Samara; she wasn't good at this sort of...mourning, sorrowful business anyway. Confronting the sheer annihilation that awaited them upon Final Death was like gazing off into the void between galaxies, or falling upward forever against the sky.

She just held Samara close in one arm, kissed the side of her head, and sent her out to...whatever the night held for one such as she.

Later, she sat there on the edge of the dock, watching the tankers float by, dumping their foul effluence into a Gulf that belonged to nobody but the oil companies, the shipping firms, the fishing industry. Monroe watched them drift like her heart, spinning directionless in the warm sea of Zairah and Cleon...and Yusuf, too. She opened the compartment of her mind where she'd stuffed down the memory of that doomed Shrike hunt, unwrapping it like an old map and laying it out across the table of her analytical mind

The plan had been orderly and well wrought by the standards of any of the Syndicate's schemes - entry, engagement, exit, all sketched out with satellite maps Vorath had displayed generously on one of those SmartBoard TVs he'd stolen from Prescott Elementary. In Monroe's mind, used to confrontation with much more powerful, lone nightmares with an abundance of unknown power, it had been well thought out:

● Corra, quick as lightning and silent as snow on the surface of a pond (not that Monroe had ever seen snow) would wait for it to rise from beneath the docks - Sam had pinpointed the exit of its...nest, or wherever it laired

● Vorath, ever resourceful and merciless as a mongoose, had bound and chained one of his own gang who'd broken some sacred rule behind his motorbike; he'd scream and bleed, leaving a cheerful trail of terror and gore that would draw the Shrike's attention

● William, quiet as a shadow and strong as a backhoe, would wait with a fishing net, cunningly hooked up to a trigger-trap that would engulf the Shrike and bring it low...she didn't expect him to partake in the actual murder that would result

● Monroe, ready with the AK-47 she'd kept as a souvenir from her first cartel kill, would soak it with hot lead; Vorath had his 12-gauge, the one he'd supposedly carried with him in Angola; Corra kept it simple with a pair of Tec-9s.

Oh how everything had fallen apart...

Monroe's legs swung back and forth as she considered the black, oily water. Her phone was soon in her fingers, scrolling down to the hidden folder she locked with facial recognition, opening ChainLinq - the most secure messaging app she could rustle up - seeking Yusuf's texts. She'd been hoping that he'd message her first, but no such luck tonight; unbidden, her mind leapt jealously and foolishly to pointless conclusions: he was out partying and actually living his life instead of being...dragged down by her; maybe he was fucking one of his groupies, and the thought made her grind her teeth together - which was just...ridiculous. Preposterous, she didn't have any right to tell him what to do. She had no claim to his heart.

Especially because she was planning to do the unthinkable and involve him in covenant politics, but she'd run out of options. The Cause was bigger than one woman fulfilling her desires or playing one man's heart to the tune of slaughter, and even if she was a sinful and manipulative carrion creature at heart, she still cared for her fellow Kindred. This was her penance for being a rotten, small-hearted person while she was still alive, but...did being this way actually make anything better?

Monroe: `Hey handsome wh`

She deleted the message angrily before it was sent off into the void, wrestling down the impulse to simply throw her phone into the water. This wasn't like her at all, agonizing over what to text a man , though...he really wasn't just any man, not by a long shot. She'd grown comfortable with Yusuf Mizrah and was finally done fighting what she could have, and those few nights after he took her to Villa Forte had been wonderful .

He'd come to her, shortly after she'd awakened (and Samara had vacated), and every night had been the sort of warm, wonderful closeness she thought she'd left behind forever. They'd done these...sappy-ass, cliche mortal things like watching silly comedies at his place; going to museums and art shows at night; he even tried to teach her how to play video games (incredibly sweet, but she pre-dated computers and was confounded by controllers).

They'd behaved like...people who were dating , and the word itself made her want to curl up into herself like a dying spider but that was just because she was so. Fucking. Jaded . Not jaded enough, though; she had moved from addiction to his good looks, his potent blood and his big cock to something different. She felt so...comfortable and at peace in Yusuf's presence.

Why, oh why, was she pacing back and forth across the dock, squeezing her phone in her hands and worrying it like a stress-ball? What was she going to say...? All her witty openers and leads seemed to leak from her head, like her brains had turned to runny eggs - why hasn't he texted me yet? - and she began to doubt herself horribly. Maybe she'd done something he hadn't liked, or...maybe he'd found someone who was actually alive and breathing, who wasn't a soulless pile of physical processes sustained by dark, evil magic...or maybe he'd just grown sick of her -

Her phone buzzed in her hand, and she looked down to see a message from him...it was a video link, only about five seconds long of someone's cat attempting to jump a baby fence; it clearly misjudged and ended up falling catastrophically. It was so stupid as to be a lackadaisical rope, tossed down into the cavern of her mind to drag her back up from the foul mist of doubt. Throwing pride and judgment to the wind again, her fingers tapped over her keyboard and she hit 'SEND' without checking her spelling.