Thirst Ch. 12

"And, rockstar? How do we know 'em when we see 'em?"

The question brought him back, and soon he was staring past her, lips moving of their own accord. "...they're all different, but every one of them has - "

- a beacon, there, at the very top of the tower. In the stormy dark, he could only make out the skittering silhouettes of men and women scaling up and down the radio antenna, dragging cables like spiders trailing webs as they girded it with laptops, TVs and car radios and hundreds of smart phones. Each of them scrolled a marquee of shifting, spidery silver runes that repeated the Outsider's impossibly long name; already he could feel its dread presence, hurtling down toward them -

Mizrah caught himself before the memories metastasized into something resembling a Nam flashback, realizing Monroe was running her fingers through his hair, even pinching his cheek lightly with a little smirk.

"Sounds pretty fucked up," she stated bluntly against his forehead (this angle offered a wonderful view of her firm cleavage). "Well Mister Yusuf Miz-er-rah," the Syndicate leader bit through each syllable like she was shearing throats, "you were smart asking me to tag along, cuz Charlie here?" The sound of her nails scraping along the barrel of her AK made him smile. "She's gonna protect you from that creepy-ass gribbly shit. No moon-bitch or her DIY SETI toys are gonna fuck with my big bad man...I'll go all Fallujah on 'em." She put a finger-gun under his chin, tipping it up with a subdued bam and pressing her lips once more to his, banishing his anxiety back into the darkness, replacing it with steel-ground confidence.

I can do this. Monroe Carter is at my side. I'm not Hunting alone this time.

"I'm gonna check the house, see if anyone else is in there with her." Mizrah carefully disentangled himself from her, the both of them climbing out into the humid night.

"You?" once again she failed to hide her skepticism, gracing him with an up-down look. "You're loud enough for five people Yusuf - oh."

Was that revulsion in her voice, as his body defied supposedly immutable physical laws and became a rangy-limbed, bristling black wolf? His claws skittered across the pavement and then fell silent once he crossed into overgrown lawn and under shadowy eaves.

Months had passed since he wore the Wolf Shape, so far removed from his birth form. It wasn't an entirely uncomfortable sensation, akin to emerging cramped vehicle after a days-long journey and stretching bone-stiff limbs. Where once the night had been uncomfortably serene, it became lively as Riverside at midday.

Where before he'd heard only his own breathing and the shuddering cough of his vehicle, shadows tuned from radio darkness into coherency as he passed houses and caught bits and pieces of their occupants' conversations; a mouse skittered up a tree trunk pausing to burp, audible as if it'd crept past his ear; three blocks away, a child woke up in shrieking terror.

Bathed in the gloaming light of the crescent moon, the gray-chromed world before him was bright as the afternoon; each supple wave of grass left silvery trails, and even the lazy journey of night-bugs crawling up flower stalks caught his attention.

That all paled, of course, before the world of scent, lain bare in all its glory; a billion tiny threads of information that curled and intertwined with each other, a whole universe of secrets flowing across the back of his tongue. He smelled: the petroleum-rich comet-trail of a passing Saab and the half-decaf gas station coffee that mixed with the occupant's spicy, sodium-heavy stomach contents... sure to give her indigestion later on.

The ozone rich stink rising from loamy dirt, springy beneath his claws...the City's whorish perfume that preceded the arrival of another loose summer storm.

The gamey tang of a squirrel watching him with idiot fear, pissing itself at his passage.

The corroded ferrous reek of dozens of cars, in various states of degradation or abandonment...yet in their fiberglass corpses, life squirmed and bloomed and gushed forth beneath the muddy, oil-slicked grass.

Did Monroe see the world in a similar thousand-shade, high definition brightness? Or was her reality solely experienced through blood-tinted glass? With one final look at her over his withers, Yusuf turned his mind to the Hunt...to the image of his prey. Shamrys was known to him, with her deep-set, haunted eyes, the henna that crawled up her raven-talon fingers to her shoulders, her gait like a shifting tongue of flame.

Mizrah's paws whispered across the wet lawn as he crossed into her property, squirming underneath a picket fence and dirtying his otherwise immaculate coat. Yusuf immediately felt the difference when he crossed into Shamrys' yard - already a few degrees colder, the fur on his shoulders and the back of his neck stood up on end. The ground seemed to crackle beneath his feet as if he was stepping on permafrost, and sure enough...the moonlight was a bit brighter here.

None of that necessarily meant that Shamrys was already lost to them, or that the Lunar Curse had taken root in this place but it brought to mind those places in Chicago that had succumbed, where -

- the rooftop gardens had blossomed unto alabaster, curling corruption. The emeralds and browns of nature were bleaching like coral in a poison sea, flowers once familiar twisted into spiral shapes that glintered at the edges with wet argent stains. Angular, straight-edged stonework appeared to have been melted by solar-hot, gigantic fingers and formed into whorls and uneven circles that reminded him of hungry, toothless maws -

...but there was none of that here, nothing but a crawling sense of displacement and quiet. Yusuf crept along the side of a toolshed, ultra-refined senses revealing not a soul; he could hear a beating heart, smell another living creature's breath from meters away.

For a minute that seemed to stretch and distort under the sickle moon's ill-willed gaze, he simply watched Shamrys' house. It distinguished itself little from its neighbors, with its off-white, dirty siding, its slanted roof of uneven black tiles and its windows with the curtains drawn. The sheer plainness of it all felt distinctly...not right, and he half expected something diaphanous and many-fanged to swoop down at him from a corner but he was left unharassed.

A great cloud of unknowing pushed at the bulwark of his confidence, bidding him to abandon this place and take the Hunt elsewhere; surely she wasn't fool enough to build a Fane at her own home, not when -

...that was when he noticed the grain silo, right before him.

It stood right there in her backyard, a rusty hulk of corrugated metal that he'd somehow entirely overlooked. Moving back a few startled steps, as if it'd simply manifested there from thin air, fully constructed, Yusuf noted the small paper squares strung around the circumference of the structure, and...no, scratch that. Yusuf recognized the scent of tanned, pressed human flesh, all from the same person as well as the sinew that kept it suspended.

Each was inscribed with delicate, spidery runework that made his stomach roil and shift, as if it was moving independently of his own body. While ignorant of its meaning, Sadira had inscribed enough orisons and dweomers that he recognized a Malediction - that being an inscribed curse, one that twisted the environment...and in this case, its purpose was to obfuscate. He'd been exposed to enough of them that sometimes he could see through, clawing apart the illusion.

A horrible dread formed gripped like an unwelcome lover's arms around his midsection, digging fingers into his belly; he backed away slowly until a voice nearly sent him startled out of his own fur.

"Yusuf," it barely breathed, and he wheeled in a show of bristling fangs before recognizing Monroe - at once disheartened and impressed that he hadn't noticed her approach, given her still, silent heart.

Chill you pussy, he chided himself before crackling and shifting into the shape his lover would recognize - no dread disgust in her eyes as he changed, simply a wary quiet.

"You look nervous as a long-tailed cat in a room full of rocking chairs," she stated dryly, open-carrying her rifle...bold.

"I am." Yusuf stepped closer to her and pointed at the silo. "That's our rocking chair."

As expected she didn't even give a glance in that direction, instead fixing him with long-suffering concern, jabbing a thumb over her shoulder. "Yusuf, nobody's here...we ain't gonna be finding anything worth our time." Her vehemence, the edge of impatience in her voice...all expected, all part of the contradiction, the unWill originating from the Malediction.

"No babe, follow my finger. Look where I'm pointing," Mizrah insisted, even as frustration drew across her pretty face.

"Mizrah, we're burning precious time fucking around out here." She sounded so damn sure of herself, but under it was a shiver of doubt...a corner of her mind rejecting The Lie that the silo wasn't actually there. "Best we can do is try to pick up her trail - "

"Monroe. Look. I know, you're gonna feel angry and irritated with me and that's part of her trick, the one that makes you not want to see what I'm pointing right at, right in front of your face. Please baby, don't be mad, just look for me."

Carter looked like she was on the edge of shouting at him, fangs pressing savagely against her lips, but her expression softened at those last words. "No, baby..." she echoed, and the edge of fear dulled whenever she called him that. Her jaw worked, as if biting and chewing on words, her palm reaching forward to slide between the cut of his pecs before, with a visible effort, she craned her neck up past his charming face.

"Oh." Her mouth hung open, words stolen from her throat as her senses pushed through cloak cast over her senses. "...that's a creepy fuckin' trick."

He grunted in agreement as they both found themselves staring at the bizarre, revealed structure. No door was apparent to either of them on this side. "Given that it's hiding in plain view, looks like this is Shamrys' architecture project...yeah. Nothing conclusive yet, but it looks bad for her." His heart was sitting somewhere between his epiglottis and his gullet as he pondered the implications; firstly, that if he hadn't come out here and discovered this, the Moon's Curse might find a means to spread amongst other Firstbloods like him.

Worse than that, in his own selfish view, was what it would mean if Adam or Ariadne decided to investigate. "Our timing is good, it hasn't metastasized and fucked up her neighborhood. She might be out Hunting, which means we have time to investigate...maybe wait for her."

Carter turned back to assess the structure once more, cocking a hip in a way that drew his attention from its rusty, looming presence...the one pleasant thing to look at within a few square miles, at the least. "I'mma check it out - "

Everything that happened next was a painful reminder that he hadn't always been so weak; once he would have been canny to the trick that befell him. Adam and Ariadne had been right; before his downfall, his had been a name attached to fearsome Hunts, but his decadence with this woman and his refusal to take down Big Prey had brought him low.

Even in his human shape, the explosion of gunfire was agony for his hearing, but worse than any physical pain he could suffer was watching buckshot blast through Monroe's torso. He'd never seen a more vivid red than her heart's blood spattering like spilled rubies across the grass, and the way she fell lifeless and limp threatened to close the curtains on his sanity.

No time to process the image of her rainbow braids spread haphazard across the lawn, the ragged holes blown through her chest or her shocked grimace, only bare seconds to remind himself: gunshots don't kill vampires.

He looked dumbly in the direction of the gunfire.

A man stood naked before him, leveling the Remington 12-gauge his way and ratcheting the pump mechanism to load another shell. He was stooped under the sag of his own flesh, his pallor like bleached hardwood. Small squares of tanned, pressed flesh inscribed with spidery runes were stapled chaotically across his sunken chest, over his swollen belly, over one eye; the other stared at him through a milky white film.

"Beautiful night, don't you think?" he slurred casually, as if speaking through a mouthful of custard.

The world became a pale, bland canvas upon which he painted the viscera and bones of the man - a vague corner of his mind capable of reasoning concluded him to be Shamrys' Thrall, perhaps a relative - tearing him open with horrible abandon. Yusuf reached and tugged, from the unfortunate mortal's gullet to his crotch, splashing him across the lawn in a fit of cathartic Rage that passed as quickly as it'd come.

He blacked out on the seconds between standing over the Thrall's eviscerated, gasping body and cradling Monroe's. Wordless, shaking her limp form, he touched the bloody pattern of buckshot blown through her, a panicked sob escaping his lips.

"N-no...Carter, get up. Come on, this is nothing for you...babe, please," he begged her, rocking her back and forth in a panic.

At the least, in those seconds before his downfall, the sorrow-shot cloud that was corroding his higher thoughts cleared as she opened a golden, raptor-deadly eye.

She was looking intently at something over his shoulder.

Shit, SHIT -

Something heavy and solid came down on the back of his head, cracking through his skull and stabbing bone through his cerebrum; his world exploded into colorless light, body going rigid and nerveless as he fell forward onto the loamy, cold grass.

The last thing he saw, before consciousness abandoned him, was Monroe, lying nearby on her back, watching him impassively as strong, clawed fingers dug into his ankles, dragging his convulsing form toward a cellar door.