Chapter 104

~~Eric~~

They took a trip to a club. Eric was kind of sick of the club scene, working at Bloodlust all the time; not that Bloodlust really counted as a club, more of a night lounge thing. Bloodlust had the music, the low light, and the people, just less of them. To go to a proper nightclub was not how he wanted to spend the night, but Matthew and Arturo assured him it was temporary.

They didn’t need to convince the bouncer to let them in. Natasha wrapped them in her Kindred powers, and somehow, they just strolled in. It was almost enviable. Werewolves could go unseen in the shadows, perhaps to degrees that vampires couldn’t, but vampires could blend into a crowd in ways the wolves never could. For werewolves, they were wolves deep down to the soul, but vampires were something else, something that still coexisted and thrived with humans, around humans, and on humans. According to Jessy, they held kinship with crows, rats, cockroaches, and other animals that thrived among humans. Werewolves did not.

Eric doubted he’d ever feel comfortable around a group of humans again. Ah well, he was happier being around vampires like Jessy, and even the other werewolves.

Inside the club Fallen Angels — good god that name — Eric found the same scene he found at Bloodlust, just dialed up to eleven, as he suspected. The dance floor was crowded, with bodies pressed together, dancing and sweating and rubbing against each other. The smell of alcohol was blatant, and other drugs the two hundred people were enjoying.

“Nothing like the smell of people having a good time, to get me hungry!” Jessy shouted. The swirling lights of different colors did a strange job of illuminating anything, psychedelic like the fucking eighties, but Jessy made sure to hold onto Eric’s hand as she followed after Matthew’s back. “Fuck, I haven’t been here in years! Look at this!” She gestured to several of the people they were pushing past. Two girls, not women, girls, maybe nineteen, had pulled their tube tops up and were rubbing their breasts together. They were surrounded by other bodies, men and women, grinding and bouncing, and the two girls were obviously enjoying being the center of attention.

“Places like this make me feel old as fuck,” he shouted back. Christ, the music was loud.

“Ha, with age comes wisdom! Half these dudes probably don’t know what a fucking g-spot is! Let alone where it is.” Shrugging at him, she continued to pull on him through the crowd. He also noticed she was not pulling him in a straight line. With every weaving sweep she did through the crowd toward the back, she laughed louder, and looked over her shoulder to smile at him. She really did enjoy these clusters of flesh and sex and drugs, in a particular way only a Kindred could, a predator mingling with prey.

They lost the large back they were following. Or more likely, Jessy purposefully lost it. Natasha and her boyfriends were somewhere ahead, and Eric was pretty sure Natasha pushed through the crowd as quickly as possible. She wasn’t wrapping them up in her Discipline anymore, so the crowd could see Eric and Jessy, but at this point it didn’t matter. Everyone was loud and dancing wildly; no bouncer could manage this, or spot some people wearing casual suits among all the skimpy skirts, tank tops, and latex.

“Hey Eric! Come on, get in here!” Jessy came up beside a woman who was having a grand time, and took her by the waist. The stranger, a black woman with curly black hair a few inches long, was short and thin, very thin, a little too thin. Not anorexic, but definitely a girl of the modern era who thought runway models were a good look, and not the unhealthy sticks Eric knew they were. Excessive skinniness aside, she was cute, young, and must have set off Jessy’s vampire instincts, because Jessy slid around behind the bouncing, grinding girl, and set her hands on the girl’s chest. The girl was wearing some tiny top, white and partly see-through, showing her naked, small breasts underneath.

And Jessy sank her teeth into her, without a moment’s hesitation or foreplay. The stranger didn’t even resist. Either she’d done this before, had seen it done to other people, or most likely, was too drunk or high to think a stranger kissing their neck was anything other than awesome.

Jessy looked at Eric as she drank, a twinkle in her eye. Insatiable, this woman, for blood and sex, and she let her hands roam over the young girl’s body as she grinned at him.

“Jessy! Come on, we’re supposed to be following Matt and Art.” He came in close, very close, leaning in and putting his lips up to Jessy’s ear.

Groaning, half annoyed and half delighted, Jessy lifted her head and wiped a drop of blood from her mouth. “Why the rush? Come on, get in here. Hey, girl! This is my boyfriend.” She slipped an arm around the girl’s shoulders, and pointed her at Eric. “Mind if we take you off to the side for a quickie?”

“Not ... at ... all.” The girl, high or drunk, was now high on the Kiss. She swayed half with the beat, half with the exhaustion the Kiss brought on, along with its pleasure. But, high as she was, she still managed to step a few inches closer to Eric, and press hard nipples against his suit jacket. “Or, right here? We can dance, Mister Handsome, fuck and dance to the beat.”

Eric blinked down at the skinny girl. Ok, yeah, she was attractive, and Jessy knew how to spark his hunger like she had a fucking switch for it; several orgasms already tonight, and he was ready to go again, because of her. Well, not only her, but also because of his Uratha endurance demanding he satisfy his hungers, and her having a switch to his libido, was a dangerous combination. And surrounded by all this flesh, sweat, moving bodies, and pulsating music, he was two steps away from listening to Jessy, grabbing this girl, and fucking her here and now. He could imagine it, taste the thought, hear and smell it, the feeling of this tiny girl’s slit spread taught around his cock, as Jessy, his mate, played with her body from behind, fondling her small breasts and Kissing her—

Eric shook his head to dislodge the thought, and then again to deny the stranger’s approach. Breathe, Eric, like the moon told you. Breathe.

“Tempted, very tempted, but my girlfriend and I have an engagement.”

The stranger sighed, as did Jessy. The vampire let the girl go, and enjoying her new high and undoubtedly tingling, aroused skin, the girl drifted back into the crowd. No doubt someone was going to lift up her tiny skirt, and fuck her until she was melting, with how the Kiss prepared her. That could have been Eric fucking her, too. But too young, and they really did have an engagement to get to.

And, deep down beneath the surface thoughts, he knew he didn’t want to fuck her. Much as Jessy was pushing to bathe him in more pussy than he knew what to do with, he found himself pulling back from the idea. He liked the one-on-one approach. Too old fashioned for Dolareido, maybe.

“You’re no fun,” Jessy said.

“You’d really get a random girl involved?”

“What? Not involved.” She kept close to him, lips to his ear so she didn’t have to scream too loud. “But Kindred do what Kindred do, you know? We get in the crowds, we mingle, we drink, and we fuck. I just thought you’d want to be part of that, share in the fun.”

Eric smiled. There was something touching in that, in Jessy trying to find ways to make him happy. It was almost like an alien race, trying to make another alien race happy, and hosting a cultural event the former loved, while the latter could not appreciate it at all. Course, he loved sex, so he was sure he’d break eventually, if she kept trying. A random stranger, a young girl at that, was too big a step though. But he could tell Jessy was aching for some of her old habits to be satisfied, and he had to accept that, while Jessy seemed committed to their relationship, she also used to indulge in orgies as a regular thing. Her sleeping with him and only him was almost abstinence for her, werewolf transformations excluded.

“And if I got her pregnant?”

“I—fuck, I forgot.” Laughing, she slapped herself in the forehead. “Sorry, not really a concern for vamps.”

“I’ve noticed.”

“But, hey, if I get a sweet girl as a ghoul, you wouldn’t fuck her with me? I mean, I wouldn’t fuck her without you of course. Just, I hear about the shit Tash is up to, and Jack, and even ... Julias, and I get all envious, you know?”

He rolled his eyes, put a hand on her shoulder, and started pushing her through the crowd in the direction he saw Matt and Art go earlier. “I’ll think about it.”

She threw up her hands as they moved, laughing and enjoying her exaggerated motion, like a sitcom. “I’ll make sure she’s hot. We could find one who’s tiny, like that girl. Or someone busty. Or both. You were into Fiona right? Short and stacked? She’s half boob.”

He put Jessy in a headlock, and started dragging her through the crowd. “You have no focus.”

“Oh you mother fucker, I am going to kill you in a second here.” She squirmed and wriggled, but with so many people around, bodies bumping into each other, and him never stopping, she couldn’t get her footing to break free.

Eventually they were on the other side of the dance floor. Matt and Art had followed along the wall, while Jessy had taken the scenic route, straight onto the middle of the crowd and borderline orgy. Once they got to the other side, Matt and Art were waiting for them, Natasha too, and all of them had an eyebrow raised at the sight of Jessy in a headlock.

“I had to,” he said, releasing his girlfriend at last. “She was being a menace.”

Jessy came out of the headlock slapping, fingers hitting his shoulders and chest several times before she stepped to the wall and adjusted her suit. “I was just grabbing a bite to eat.”

“Again.”

“Hey, I got a big appetite.”

“For a lot of things.”

“You don’t like that?” She gave him doe eyes, and pressed her biceps close together along her chest, hands down at her thighs. A very dainty, sweet, innocent posture, that didn’t fit her in the slightest.

“Course I like that. But—”

“I think,” Art said, raising a hand, “maybe you can talk about it later?”

Eric and Jessy shared a glance. It was a weird conversation, and it never really got to argument stage; hard to get to that stage when it was your girlfriend pushing to have more boobs in the bed. So they shrugged and nodded.

Once again, Natasha wrapped them up in her Discipline, and the group of them continued on their journey. Eric had no idea where that was, though, and Matt and Art were reluctant to say; reluctant, or they enjoyed being teases. And once Art started climbing a pillar along the back wall, Eric figured they just enjoyed being teases, cause they were smiling like jackasses.

“Up there?” Natasha said.

Matthew nodded. “Yeah, up in the catwalk.”

Catwalk? Eric looked up and scanned, raising a hand over his eyes to try and block some of the pulsing, colored lights. There was a catwalk, not unlike the ones you’d find in a theater. The pillar Arturo started climbing was a ladder, four ladders together in a square, and Eric had thought it was shaped like that for aesthetic. Apparently not, with similar structures hanging from the ceiling with lights attached to them.

“Anyone afraid of heights?” Matthew said, chuckling as he started climbing after Arturo.

So this was why they needed to come inside the building. Wherever they were going, it was up. Thankfully, the pillars were sturdy, so sturdy that even the combined weight of Arturo and Matthew didn’t make the one they were climbing tremble in the slightest. Once Natasha and Jessy were climbing, Eric waited a bit, and followed after. Again, the pillars held strong, not vibrating at all. A good thing Natasha was keeping him hidden with her Discipline though, because holy fuck it would have looked weird as hell to anyone who noticed them, five people climbing up from a dance floor.

Up, and up, and up they went. The ceiling was easily forty feet up, and Eric sucked in his breath when he glanced down. Would he survive that if he fell? With his new body, he probably would, and he was sure he’d recover in days, instead of years. Didn’t mean he wanted to experience that though, or the nausea that came with looking down from such a height.

Once they were at the top of the pillar, it was a hassle to climb up onto it. No railings, and no solid floor, just more ladder steps, except beneath them. One slip and they’d be falling. Ok, so not a catwalk then, but some sort of contraption meant to hang heavy lights and heavier speakers from. No one was supposed to be on climbing on it, and definitely not walking on it, without a harness.

“Over there,” Matthew said, no longer needing to yell quite as loud since the speakers were a fair ways below them, hanging from wire, and pointed downward at the dance floor. His finger pointed at a section where the not-catwalk crossed over the center of swarming masses.

Everyone got moving. It hit Eric, like a ton of bricks, that he was a child compared to these four people. Matthew, Arturo, Natasha, and Jessy all walked across the thin beams without issue, without looking down, without losing their balance, without a care for the possibility they’d fall. The bars weren’t far apart, one every foot, and as long as he didn’t try and balance on a single one, walking along them was easy enough, but his brain kept telling him ‘look down you might fall what the fuck are you doing’. It was a mental game, one he hadn’t developed, while the other four had.

They’d been doing death-defying acts for decades, the vampires especially, and Eric had only been in this madness for about a year. Something like this, like walking really high up over what could easily be a major injury-inducing fall, was not something his mind was prepared for. In the past, he’d have backed off, climbed back down, said nope, fuck that, hurt my knee once already. But his knee was fine now, and he had the soul of a wolf. He could push on. Hell, part of him wanted to, just to not let Jessy see he was, evidently, afraid of heights.

Once the five of them were standing precariously over the center of the stage, and holding onto some of the enormous metal pipes sticking up from the structure, Arturo gestured around them.

“This place has collected a lot of essence over the decades,” Art said, “more than is natural. I don’t know why, or exactly where it’s collecting. I think it’s the lights.”

Eric looked down at the enormous lights at their feet. “Lights collect essence?”

“We think something triggered it,” Matt said. “People come here for the light show, and we think it escalated from there over the decades. The essence accumulating here is, as typical of Dolareido, a form of pleasure. Any essence will do. It accumulates, creates a locus, and here we can cross the Gauntlet.”

“How?” the two vampires said.

Art shrugged. “Same way you vampires do anything you do. It’s a part of you, right? Same as moving a limb.”

“N-Not exactly the same,” Natasha said. “Using a D-Discipline is like ... we have to reach for our blood to fuel it.”

“Well, you know what I mean. It may be a new muscle, but it’s still a part of you, something you feel. Werewolves have a spiritual half, and to cross the Gauntlet, you have to tap into that, and use it, tell it to cross over. Explaining it is hard, because it’s like trying to explain how to bend your finger. You just do it, you know?”

“Oh, oh! Mind muscle c-connection.” Natasha almost jumped, obviously excited about getting to include some science in the conversation.

“Sure,” Art said, shrugging again. “You can tap into your blood as a reflex, right? It’s not something you conjure, or use a tool to access, it’s a part of you. Eric here doesn’t know shit about those muscles, and learning to use them can be disorienting.”

“Avery wants to teach you,” Matt said, “before you find yourself totally confused. You can extend your senses into the Hisil you know, and look at what’s going on there, instead of here. Imagine if you did that without realizing. How would you react?”

“I’d probably be pretty fucking confused.”

“Exactly.”

“So,” Art said, “if you’re willing to listen to us at least, this should be educational. You’re going to cross the Gauntlet first, breach it, and we’ll follow in your wake.”

“I’m going first?”

“Yeap,” the two men said.

“And I should just be able to ... do this, like flexing a muscle?”

Art nodded. “Kind of, yeah. A better way to think of it, is that you’re in bed right now, and to climb out of bed, you need to be at a locus like here. Think of the physical world as if your bed’s blankets are too tight, and here at a locus, your blankets are loose enough that now you can pull them off and get up.”

That, was a strange way of putting it, half because of the ridiculous comparison, but also because it felt true. He did feel the aura of the essence, the strange elevation that came with being in its presence. Course, he had no fucking idea what that meant or how to use it.

“Ok, so, if I go first, you’ll be right behind me?”

“Yeap,” Matt said, “like dolphins following a boat.”

Eric looked down, and — mistake, seeing the massive drop below — got ready to try what Art described. The physical world was a blanket, holding him down in his bed. Here, surrounded by this invisible energy only the Uratha could sense, the tethers holding him down were loose. He could slip free of them here. Somewhere deep in the gray matter of his brain, he knew he could do that, could cross over to a place where his bonds were gone.

So, he did. In the same way he knew he could transform into a wolf or a giant beast of destruction, in the same way he knew how to breathe or how to flex a muscle, he knew he could breach the Gauntlet here. He took a deep breath, and another, reached out, and pulled off the blanket.

Noise bled away. The sensation of flesh faded. Gravity and weight, clothes and skin, it all became background noise, as white and gold filled his eyes. He looked around, and watched as the club disappeared from sight. His girlfriend was behind him, and a little ways behind her, was Matt, Art, and Natasha, but it was hard to see them. Hearing them was difficult. Smelling them was impossible.

He moved forward. He knew to do that. They were crossing a wall that separated the physical from the spiritual, that separated his old life and his new, and instinct told him to push forward. Don’t stop in the Gauntlet, you won’t like what’s hiding in there, Eric.

Doing this on his own sent a surge of joy through him, as if finding a freedom he didn’t realize existed before. What were those old instructions? Second star to the right, and straight on till morning.

~~Jack~~

The three of them stared at the man, and Jack knew his jaw had dropped.

“You’re ... serious.”

“I am.” The tall man rotated his shoulder a few times as if it were injured, but Jack could see he was using it as an feint so he could look over his shoulder and around, checking for spying eyes. “Angela is going to get me and my friends killed. Jeremiah and his crusade needs to stop. You vamps don’t do half the shit vamps do in other cities, so we have no reason to keep this up. I ... I’m here to bring this shit to an end.”

“Should have thought of that,” Jack said, leaning in closer to the man, “before you killed my sire. Yeah, I recognize you, from the hospital.”

Harcourt winced and looked away. His fingers tapped on the table with the music, a poor attempt to mask how nervous the man was.

“Look, I’m here, aren’t I? I know what that means. I’m pretty much putting my life in your hands here, so you can put a stop to Jeremiah and Angela.”

“Now you want to stop them?” Jack said. “Why not before?”

“I didn’t realize before, how fucked up a person Angela was! We didn’t know about those two women she stabbed, until it was mentioned at the hospital, when that shit went down, you know, where you killed a bunch of my friends? I looked into what you said about Angela, about the woman in the hospital and her daughter. And yeah, it lines up.”

“And...”

“And it’s more than just that. We’ve all seen how unstable she is, and Jeremiah doesn’t seem interested in calming her down or helping her out. Hell, he pushes her to get more psychotic about shit.”

Jack looked to his friends. Damien was in analyze mode, as per any Mekhet. Fiona, on the other hand, looked like she was trapped between fear and excitement, her eyes locked on Harcourt. Damien had mentioned she seemed to be a bit of a fear and excitement junkie; this situation would feed right into that.

“If you’re lying,” Jack said, “you know what I’ll do to you.”

“I do. I’m here because I’m serious about wanting to take Angela down. Jeremiah too. His crusade against Azamel is ... fuck me, I feel like I’m working for a literal crusader, complete with burning people at the stake.” Harcourt took a deep breath, clapped his hands together, and turned in his seat to face Jack more head on. “But you’ll want proof. I know you’re a Ventrue, so, make me tell you the truth.”

Jack snapped his hand out, and grabbed the man by the neck. Even without the curse, Jack was still a vampire, over two years old, and had enough strength in his grip to kill this man. But with the curse, he could flay this man into strips with a fingernail. Harcourt’s hands took him by the wrist, but as the man struggled, Jack let just a little of the curse flow out of him, flow through him, and into his fingers. The hunter froze as he felt the power of Jack’s vise grip, and how his struggles did nothing to dislodge it.

“You saw what I did to your hunter friend with my bare hands?”

The man shook his head. He must have missed it, then, in the chaos of crows.

“I popped him like a grape, Harcourt. I squashed him until he split down the middle, with my hands. You fuckers awoke something inside me. That’s how I summoned my army, and it’s how I’ll do it again if I find out you’re lying. I’ll feed you to the crows, alive, and I’ll make sure they start with the fingers first, then toes, then your face, then your guts. It’ll take days to die. Understand?” The man nodded desperately. Either he was overwhelmed with the immediate need to avoid having his throat crushed, knowing full well Jack would crush it a minute later once he’d discovered the truth, or he was telling the truth.

But Jack wasn’t about to risk accepting a man’s word. The hunter expected him to use Dominate, to dig up the truth, and that’s what he was going to do. Jack leaned in closer to the man, pulled him toward him, and met his eyes.

The hunter’s tattoos, or maybe it was the necklace, or the strange bracelet made of old string, but something the hunter had on created a barrier for Jack’s mind. It reminded Jack of that time he was captured in handcuffs that had a magical property. He’d broken through them then, the magical, invisible barrier, and breaking through whatever protection this hunter had was going to be easier, now that Jack had the full might of the curse to back him. The issue now, was not accidentally destroying the hunter’s mind in the process of getting through the barrier.

“Look ... into my eyes...” Jack stared hard into the man, reached out with his vitae, and tried to find the balance. Was it like this for other Ventrue? It couldn’t have been. They didn’t have some extra force pushing and pulling inside them. He supposed most vampires had to learn to use their abilities like driving a car. Jack had to learn to ride a horse, or a better comparison: learn to ride a dragon. It wasn’t just an extension of him, like a vehicle was, or any tool. It had a mind of its own, and unlike most Kindred’s Beasts, this one had its own awareness that it was willing to throw at him.

If he fucked up this strange balance, he’d break this fool’s mind, and then he’d be useless. Their one opportunity to get the hunters, to find a way to catch them, and if Jack screwed up, they could be set back months, years, or fucking decades.

Jack sighed relief as he felt the vitae connect mind to mind, an invisible tether that reached through the air. He could feel the man’s mind now, something in the distance that he could touch, mold, and break.

“Are you being honest, about why you’re here?” The man again nodded desperately. Jack’s grip had loosened enough to let the man breathe, but only just. “You’ve told us no lies?” More nods. “And you aren’t planning to betray us?” More nods.

Satisfied, Jack released the man’s throat, and his grip on the man’s mind. The connection snapped like a giant elastic band, and Jack had to take a second to not recoil from the power of it. His natural talent for Dominate paled in comparison to the power the curse brought to the table.

As his mind came back to him, Jack looked to Fiona and Damien. His friend was looking at him with obvious worry, but Fiona looked almost inspired by Jack’s power, excited, and awestruck. She could see things Damien couldn’t, things Jack couldn’t see either. Maybe she could see what Jack felt, black tendrils reaching out from his core and into the man’s mind.

The hunter, gasping for breath, managed to not give into his obvious fear and run away. This man had the scars of someone who’d dealt with fear the hard way, face on, and it hadn’t broken him so far. He was a reliable man for his fellow hunters, then, or at least he had more courage than fear.

“Can I speak now?” he said. Jack nodded, eyes locked onto the hunter’s face. “Right. So, you know that Jeremiah and Angela came here to kill Azamel, right?” Damien and Fiona slowly nodded this time. Jack kept his gaze on the hunter, eyes stabbing the man as he waited without patience. “I don’t know where he met this Elen witch, and I don’t know how she got that fucking monster Sándor under her spell, but I guess you know how Elen has been moving us around the city now, where you can’t find us.”

“A flesh chamber,” Jack said, a small snarl escaping him. “Fucking sick.”

“You’re telling me.” The man visibly shivered, with an exaggerated motion. He had a loud personality, this man, and if it wasn’t for the dire circumstances, he’d probably be joking, laughing, and having a drink. “You have to understand, none of us wanted this. Jeremiah picked us up from a bunch of different cities, told us stories about this monster Azamel, showed us evidence, and recruited us. A few years later, we’re neck deep in this shit, and now he’s got this witch hag helping us, giving us tattoos, healing our wounds like a regular Frankenstein, while we get butchered trying to find a way to get access to this monster’s lair.

“But like I said, you have to understand. We didn’t want this, me and my friends. Hunters avoid Dolareido because you seem to be pretty good about keeping humans alive and happy. Don’t get me wrong, a bunch of us would love to smoke you out and burn you down, but fuck me, you are so low on the list of things to give a shit about, no one comes here. We’re drowning now, clinging to each other trying to float in this river Jeremiah’s thrown us into.”

“You’re ... asking me to spare you hunters,” Jack said.

“Yeah.”

“You have no leverage. I can force from you every detail you have to offer.”

“Well, that’s the kicker. If I fight, I mean really fight, I figure I can last an hour or two before you break me, right? Got these tattoos for a reason. Thing is, this tip I’m about to give you is only good for the night. After that, I’m borderline useless to you. You might be able to use me to bait some hunters to come out and meet me for a meeting or something, but you won’t be able to catch the boss that way.”

Harcourt was wrong. He didn’t know about the curse, not truly, and how easy it’d be for Jack to smash through his supernatural defenses again, go deeper, and extract the information forcefully. Then again, the same problem presented itself, and Jack might destroy the man’s mind in the process, rendering the hunter useless to him. If Harcourt fought Jack’s Dominate this time, and Jack had to push harder to break past it and his supernatural defenses, it was a very real possibility.

“Perhaps,” Jack said. “So, what exactly are you proposing?”

“I tell you how to get Angela, Jeremiah, and the witch, tonight, if you promise to let everyone else go.”

Frowning, Jack looked to Fiona and Damien. The Begotten put up her hands, refusing to comment, but Damien leaned in over the table.

“The hunter is here on good faith, if your Dominate was successful. And if this tip is only good for the night, well ... it’s true, isn’t it, that those three are our only true targets?”

Fuck, Damien was right. And Jack didn’t want to take a gamble on getting the information with Dominate, especially if the information was only good for the night.

“I could have over a hundred vampires marching an assault on Jeremiah if I had time to prepare, Mister Harcourt,” Jack said, glaring at the terrified man beside him. “And ... you’re putting me in a position where I can’t use them.”

“Exactly. I’m trying to save as many lives as I can.”