Chapter 106

~~Natasha~~

She was going on an adventure!

There was a time, not too long ago, where such a thought would have been absurd. Adventure was not smart. Adventure was how you met an early second death. Survivor bias was a killer, and she would not let the whims of baseless positive thinking get her killed. She made only smart decisions, ones that earned her plenty of money, and status in the Invictus.

And then everything turned upside down. She met a cute boy named Damien, shot him in the head, and got involved in so many things. As a dragon, she’d gained a lot of responsibilities, many that pushed her to step outside her comfort zone. And then she had an orgy while her best friend watched. She met a couple of cute werewolves that she now had sex with regularly, at the same time. She’d seen spirits and ghostly after images, living nightmares, and spoken with what might as well have been some ancient god of death. At this point, she was starting to feel comfortable with being uncomfortable. Mostly. Somewhat. A bit.

Still, as she walked through the Gauntlet behind Matthew and in front of Arturo, she reminded herself that this was dangerous. Adventures like this were how people got killed. So, despite the fact she was going on an adventure with her boyfriends, her best friend, and her best friend’s boyfriend, she refused to let her excitement get the best of her. Fear was a better emotion, far more useful, and good at keeping her alive.

She wiped the smile off her face, and tried her best to adopt a frown instead. But after her last trip into the Shadow realm, she didn’t feel so scared anymore. Spirits were scary, sure, but not so scary they paralyzed her. They seemed alien, in a real alien way, like from another galaxy sort of way. Their mannerisms weren’t human. It was obvious at a glance that spirits did not think like humans or paranormals, and according to the Uratha, they didn’t really think at all. They were manifestations of aspects of the physical realm, and everything they did was a reaction to their environment and situations, even if it was an intelligent reaction that considered the past or future.

Which, she supposed, was an argument someone could make about sentient beings. Deterministic universe, no free will, everything is just a chain of causality and chemical reactions and neural pathways, etc. It was a train of thought she didn’t waste energy on anymore.

As they stepped out of the Gauntlet, she almost squeaked. Right, right, they were high up, and walking on support beams. Except, that’s not what they looked like in the Hisil. Here, she was walking on smoothed metal that glowed, metal that curved under her feet, and metal that felt warm through her shoes. She reached down and touched the flat, filled surface, to make sure it wasn’t hot enough to melt her feet.

It was the same building, except no longer were there any hanging lights; the glowing metal served that purpose. As far as she could tell, there weren’t any speakers, either. But there was music. It thrummed, fast and frantic, like the heartbeat of a kine on PCP. It almost sounded like drums, but the bass was so thick, she felt it in her skull.

The walls were different, too, with lots of curves that made her want to touch them, and slide along them. Beneath her, she could see spirits floating around, pink and blue with vague human shapes, rubbing along each other and the walls. She didn’t need the boys to explain to her what they were, these spirits were aspects of pleasure, sexuality, and joy. The human-shaped ones were obviously created by the humans who came to the club and had sex without end, but there were other spirits down there, too. Some of the creatures that hovered around looked like giant bees, and she had no idea what those were. Others were more obvious, like some sort of giant dragonfly-looking creature, purple, that buzzed around from table to table, leaving behind a white powder from its wings that disappeared after a few seconds. Drugs? Certainly not the pleasure of drugs, but perhaps, the distribution of it. But that made no sense. The spirits wouldn’t care about the white powder, and as she watched them from above, she was correct. They didn’t care. So why was it doing what it did?

It was a complex ecosystem, where spirits did things. She had no chance of understanding its finer points without intense study, study she was eager to pursue. And that thought made her smile. She had a boss that appreciated such dedication to examination. If Tash wanted, she could get completely lost in studying the spirits, putting together what essentially amounted to a dissertation on them, and Antoinette would both appreciate it, but also read it.

Maybe, just maybe, if she could convince her boyfriends to have a chat with her about the ecosystem of spirits, specifically those in Dolareido, it’d make Antoinette happy? It’d also piss off Avery, though. Making Antoinette happy was one of her primary goals, but she didn’t want to make the lives of her boyfriends any harder than she had to.

“They know we’re here,” Art said, “no need to hide. Just, obey the rules of the city, and Black Blood’s dominion over it will keep the spirits from getting in our way.”

“W-What are those rules?” Tash said.

Matthew shrugged, and started back along the catwalk the way they came. Much easier, now that the catwalk didn’t have holes to fall through. “Hard to say, really. Seems to be a strange balance of the official human law, and the laws the Prince has set up.” He started climbing down the support beam, and Tash sucked in a breath. The support structure didn’t have the individual rungs anymore, as if such a detail was meaningless in the spirit world; they kind of were, really. The metal was warped and bendy, and it glowed a strange rainbow of colors all the way down to the base. The group slid down them without issue, though she could see Eric struggled with the height, and how with the new support beams, they literally had to slide down them, gripping their sides as tight as they could.

Climbing back up was going to be a pain, but perhaps the Uratha had a different locus for getting back to the physical world.

On the dance floor, things were as chaotic and overflowing with life as they were back in normal Dolareido. The spirits swirled around each other, though it was plain to see some were utterly gigantic compared to others. One spirit in particular, another pink creature with decidedly feminine curves, was slithering around the dance floor, while other spirits came up to rub against her—it. Other strange creatures kept out of the way, some more dragonfly-looking things, and a few more of the odd, large bees, that looked too cartoony and simple to be actual bees. And now that she was underneath the pillars, she could see there was something actually flying around underneath the catwalk, a butterfly creature with a long, snake body, and many pairs of wings. It was glowing different colors, each pulsing with the weird, heartbeat music that wasn’t music.

The spirits didn’t seem to really care about Natasha or Jessy. Sure, they stopped and looked at them, if ‘look’ was the right word, considering many of them didn’t have eyes, or had many that looked in many directions at once. Maybe they cared a little, but it wasn’t enough to stop them from doing whatever it was they were doing.

The Uratha, on the other hand, were enough to force every nearby spirit to take notice. The strange creatures moved aside, some going so far as to flatten their serpent bodies to the curved walls to stay out of the way. She didn’t understand how a spirit of pleasure, or joy, or drugs, or pretty lights, or all the various possibilities Dolareido had to offer, could express fear, but it seemed like they were. Fear and discontent. They didn’t enjoy the presence of the Uratha.

“They really don’t like you,” Jessy said, eyes wide as she looked around. Right, this was her first step into the Hisil, and she looked at each spirit like a child’s first visit to a zoo. It made Tash giggle, seeing her badass, sporty friend regress to a young girl.

Jessy had owned a cat, before she was turned. It was easy to forget sometimes, that Jessy had a soft side.

Art shrugged, with the exact same mannerism as Matthew. Two peas in a pod, those two. “We’re the police. Yeah, they don’t like us.”

“Self-appointed police at that,” Matthew said. “If we let them do whatever they wanted, it’d lead to some ridiculous chaos.”

“But not in Dolareido,” Eric said.

Art nodded, though Tash could see the hesitance on his face. “But ... not here, no. At least, whatever strange balance Black Blood maintains here, it’s lasted. So it doesn’t want us here, naturally. But Dolareido has reached a critical mass of essence and spirits, David says. Shit’s going to pop if we don’t help.”

They stepped out of the club, and into the streets of Dolareido, in the center of South Side’s entertainment district. Jessy gasped as she looked at the buildings and their lights, how they curved in strange ways, and glowed in places where there weren’t actually any lights to glow. In the Hisil, half the buildings in South Side were glowing in strange places. Spirits flowed along, some driving along on their weird tire-asphalt hybrid bodies, others flying along on crow wings. The only ones that looked human were the obvious sex spirits, and even then, they didn’t look very human. No legs, with bodies like Casper the friendly ghost, except far too friendly, and their faces lacked much in the way of facial features. While the blue ones had broader shoulders, and the pink ones had hips and breasts, it wasn’t static. Some of them changed color, or changed shape, or both, as they came and went from the various glowing, twisted buildings. They were manifestations of sexual pleasure, after all, not of people themselves.

But there were direct manifestations of animals, she noticed. On the buildings she could see crows, though they were exaggerated in strange ways; particularly, their eyes had a habit of glowing in the dark, mostly white, but sometimes she could see a crow with red eyes peering down at her from the edges of rooftops. And the rats were practically amorphous blobs, moving along the base edge of buildings, and disappearing into the million holes Dolareido had to offer. Some were larger, had more definition, and pushed the other rats around.

“Holy shit,” Jessy said. “It’s a whole god damn new dimension.”

“You’ve been in a nightmare dimension before,” Eric said.

“Yeah but, this is, like ... there’s an entire city here! That gargoyle dude’s nightmare chamber was just a big, empty castle. I mean, my god!” She pointed up at the night sky, and the chaos of colors it held.

Natasha nodded. “True. Here it’s ... s-so alive. There’s a lot g-going on.”

Art started walking first, in the direction of Devil’s Corner, and the rest followed. “That’s just here. In most places in the city, it can be pretty sparse, and that’s true of most cities in the world. Humans and paranormals don’t have a direct reflection in the spirit world, you’ve probably noticed by now, so all the spirits are reflections of other things. It can mean some cities look sparse. Dolareido is ... not so much, not here in South Side. It’s pretty empty elsewhere though, especially North Side.”

“Why don’t they have reflections?” Eric and Jessy said in tandem.

“Hard to say. Something to do with a soul, I suppose.”

That alone was a question worth a million questions. What was special about humans and paranormals, that set them apart from other animals? A scientist would say nothing, but she was looking at evidence that suggested otherwise.

“S-Speaking of,” Tash said, “did you hear about Jack’s sister?” Everyone present nodded. “Horrible, so horrib-ble. Jack and Samantha think it’s the real her, and n-n-not a ... left b-behind image. So, her ... soul...”

Everyone shivered as they walked down the sidewalk. Talk of souls was always going to be heavy talk, especially with all the rumors of resurrection lately. With Julias dead, Tash could only imagine the sorts of things Triss was up to, especially with an ancient witch as her boss.

“Spirits don’t leave behind ghosts,” Matthew said, “ever. They can be killed, and they dissipate, become essence, merge into the environment of the Hisil, but nothing like a ghost is left behind.”

Jessy raised a hand. “How many spirits have you killed?”

Art winced and looked around. Spirits were listening, giving them space, but still listening. They didn’t like the Uratha being in their city, and admitting to killing them was probably not a good idea. “Not sure. Dozens?” he whispered. “A lot more if you include the hunts for food.”

“Food?” Tash looked around at the spirits. Some of them were talking with each other in a language she didn’t know, and she cringed at the thought of her boyfriends eating something like Safe. “H-How does that work?”

The boys looked about, motioned people in, and everyone got in close. They were still walking, but huddled up, shoulder to shoulder and with Matthew and Arturo directly behind them so they could whisper, and people could listen.

“Uratha are half spirit,” Matthew said. “We can eat spirits the same way a predator spirit can eat spirits of prey. Eric here could come hunting with us, bring down a beast of the tunnels, or maybe one of the larger rat spirits, and feast.”

Jessy raised her hand again. “Eat spirits?”

Matthew nodded. “Yeah, just like a steak.” When Tash, Jessy, and Eric all looked over their shoulders to raise brows at him, the jolly giant laughed. “You’d have to be Uratha to understand. And Eric might just not realize it, until he’s tasted it. But, maybe this hunt will awaken it in him.”

“I doubt I’ll be eating that drug spirit I saw,” he said over his shoulder.

“Maybe,” Art said. “Spirits do it to each other all the time, devour or absorb each other. A predator spirit may devour a prey spirit, with teeth and claw. Or, a predator spirit might absorb another, contesting territory or fighting for dominance over each other. Either way, you get a stronger, usually larger spirit. They get smarter, more self aware, and more capable of pursuing whatever it is they are. So, don’t feel guilty about eating them, Eric. It’s part of the ecosystem.”

Predators absorbing predators. A wolf with hawk wings? A giant scorpion in a desert, with a dozen tails? The possibilities were endless!

Tash absorbed every bit of information she could, and did her best to hide how interesting the conversation was. With Matthew and Arturo behind her, she feigned keeping her eyes on the sidewalk ahead of her, and looking around at the crazy environment of the spirit half of Dolareido, but she really wasn’t. Every detail her boyfriends dropped, she wrote down in her mind. Her boys knew by now that anything they said, she was eventually going to tell Antoinette. If they were willing to talk about it, they were willing to have Antoinette hear about it. Hopefully.

“But,” Matthew said, “most of us don’t, or don’t often. Carter does, Avery, and so does David. Some of us are closer to our spirit side than others, and some aren’t so much. I like meat, personally.”

“How do you like it cooked,” Eric said.

“Either raw or blue seared. The closer you are to your spirit side, the harder you’re going to find it to eat normal human food; most Uratha can’t touch shit like chips or french fries without getting major digestion issues.”

Natasha and Jessy laughed, and the boys blinked at them several times, before they chuckled as well. Yeah, vampires couldn’t eat anything but blood; Tash had long forgotten what a burger tasted like. For the boys to lose their ability to eat fast food, or rather, not be able to digest it easily, was cute by comparison.

“In some cities,” Jessy said, “vampires have parties where they will use the Blush of Life, and indulge in human food. They puke it up later, but I do admit, sometimes I wonder if it’d be worth it, to taste pizza again.”

Ah, yes, pizza, the ultimate food. Probably half the kine Tash had drank from her in second life had eaten pizza within at least a couple days. She couldn’t taste that of course, but statistically speaking, it was likely.

Pizza sent her down memory lane, and she smiled to herself as she thought about home. Not her current home, the apartment or the Elysium tower. She thought about her home before she died and became a vampire, before her second life began. She thought about the necklace.

“Hey ... c-can we take a d-d-detour?”

Since they didn’t have to hide their presence from watching eyes, they got to traverse Dolareido the fun way.

Matthew, Arturo, and Eric all transformed into their wolf forms. Not their regular wolf forms, but the giant wolves, bigger than lions and much thicker. This immediately earned some awwws and ooohs from her, and she hugged Matthew and Arturo as tightly as she could around their giant manes. Terrifying as they would have looked if they were snarling or growling, they were instead sitting like well-trained house dogs, and that was absolutely adorable. She squeezed on them nice and tight, buried her face deep in the fur of their necks, and giggled.

“Kat is going to wonder what the fuck is that smell,” Jessy said, but she copied Tash, and gave Eric a giant hug. Eric wasn’t sitting though. Maybe he felt self conscious about acting like a dog? It didn’t bother Jessy, but Tash couldn’t help but turn into a silly, stupid child when her boys were transformed.

She climbed onto Matthew’s back as the wolf beast stood up, and she beamed at her fellow vampire. Jessy looked at her, froze, and practically exploded.

“Oh my fucking god, that is so cute!” Jessy made a very un-Jessy squeal, and started digging into her pockets. “I need a picture! I need a ... a ... It won’t work if I take a picture, will it?”

Tash shook her head. “P-Probably not. Uratha have that lunacy thing. It w-w-won’t let cameras work right, when they’re d-doing werewolfy stuff.” She gestured down to the enormous, fluffy creature underneath her. “N-No one would confuse this for a regular wolf.”

“God fucking damn it. You’re so tiny, and he’s so big, it’s like ... arg, fuck it.” Without ceremony, she hopped onto Eric’s back. Mistake. Eric wavered for a moment as someone over twice Natasha’s weight was suddenly jumping on him, and he let out a small, deep woof noise. Frowning like a child throwing a tantrum, Jessy slid off and stomped her feet a couple times. “No fair.”

“You could transform t-too, you know.”

“I don’t have something like this,” Jessy said. Tash had seen her use various Gangrel forms that warped and twisted her human body, but actual animal transformation was something different.

“B-But you can transform into a normal wolf.”

“True.” With smile returning, Jessy began to transform into the wolf Tash had seen her use before. A normal wolf, not one of the giant beasts the boys had become.

Eric, without any indication that he was going to, transformed as well. He shrank, mass disappearing into himself, and fur thinning. A wolf was still an enormous creature, but paled in comparison to the giant mass of their bigger, Urshul form. Now, he was basically the same size as the Jessy-wolf beside him, maybe just a little bigger.

It was Natasha’s turn to make a squeal, and she struggled to keep the noise from erupting too loudly. It was so romantic, how Eric changed to match her, and now they were two beautiful wolves beside each other. Naturally, Jessy-wolf nudged into Eric-wolf, and started playing, pressing her snout into his neck, and hitting her shoulder against him. And Tash could see Eric wanted to do the same, play, wrestle, but after a couple seconds, he started walking forward.

“Yes, focus! Let’s f-focus on ... this little detour.”

Off they went, to visit the suburbs. It was a couple miles away, and if they had to walk, it would have taken a while. It didn’t seem like there were any cars to drive, though she did see several spirits that could only have been car spirits driving by; no passengers, though. Getting to the suburbs as running wolves, on the other hand, was pretty fast. Natasha was Mekhet, and could utilize Celerity to a great degree with ease, but it wasn’t really meant for running miles. The run of a wolf, on the other hand, made covering miles take only minutes.

The suburbs of Dolareido were divided into several sections that ran in an arch across where it met North Side. There was Rich Side, where Viktor and ... Julias, used to live. Then there was the normal suburbs, with one half sporting nice houses, and the other sporting still-nice-but-not-ridiculously-overpriced houses. Natasha’s mom and dad used to live in the latter, like Jack’s mom did. Maybe she’d run into Samantha and Jack’s old home while they were out looking for what she hoped to discover.

She wasn’t sure what she expected to find, but as her wolf mount slowed down and started to stroll through the streets of Dolareido’s suburbs, she knew she’d find it eventually. Unlike the city center of Dolareido’s spirit half, the suburbs were calm and quiet. Few spirits roamed the large streets, and the ones that did didn’t carry half the imposing nature of the others. The hills of grass and the small sidewalks along the front yards of houses, the small park with a swing set and sandbox, the few trees, the complete lack of convenience stores and neon signs, it was all definitely a very not-Dolareido place.

But that wasn’t fair. Dolareido had another side to it, a quiet side, a side where she’d grown up when she was human. It wasn’t a vampire friendly part of the city, from the lack of population density or gathering hubs, so vampires rarely came to the suburbs. But as she looked around at the buildings, she smiled as the memories surfaced, of growing up in the quiet world of a home instead of an apartment.

The area reflected that, she could see. Instead of bright, glowing signs that were twisted and pulsing with the Hisil’s oddness, the houses in the suburbs were visually dull. In fact, they looked too dull. The houses were there, but they lacked the features she expected to see on a house. The roofs didn’t have shingles, but were a solid black surface instead, void of texture. No siding, just a flat surface of color. The lawns were solid flat green surfaces, grass comically simple, and the sidewalks lacked the grooves she expected. So, maybe the Hisil was reflecting how dull the suburbs were? But there was more to it than that. There was an honesty to the display, of the homes showing what they were in such simple terms.

The park near her old home, on the other hand, was far more vibrant. It was night in Shadow Dolareido, but the park had a glow to it that defied her eyes. There was one electric light in the old park in the physical version, a lamp post in the center, and in the Shadow version of the park, it glowed a gentle yellow, but in a much larger area. Soothing, and warm. The swings, slide, monkey bars, sand box, they all had exaggerated features, with simple but bright colors that the single lamppost illuminated to the point they themselves glowed with its light. The grass and dirt were almost invisible, while the playground equipment drew the eye and invited interest, as if asking her to come play.

Within the park, small lights drifted around, and the three werewolves and two vampires paused to stare.

“Oh my g-god,” she said. “That’s beautiful.”

Fireflies. They couldn’t have been actual fireflies, being that they were in the Shadow Realm; maybe they were spirit manifestations of fireflies? But they were huge, and didn’t have a body. They moved around slowly through the park, and Natasha could hear what sounded like giggling, high pitched and joyful. The spirits of children? No, there were no spirits that were reflections of humans themselves, in the Hisil, but that didn’t change that the glowing orbs moved around the park, giggling like children would. They hovered about a foot above the ground, each a foot in width of pure, glowing yellow light, and while they didn’t use the swing set, or sit in the sandbox, or go down the slide, they moved around the objects that children doubtlessly used every day, to have fun.

Spirits of fun, then? Or joy? Or juvenile purity? She didn’t know, and the werewolves couldn’t talk with dog mouths to tell her. Maybe she could ask them later, but then, there was some magic to the mystery. Whatever these spirits were, they were beautiful, like fairies — the good kind — mingling among children and the joy they exuded. The sight of them dug up memories she’d thought she’d lost, memories of her as a small girl, playing with other children. Nothing in the world held the same sense of wonder or amazement, as the memories she had from when she was just a child, learning to ride the swings or go down a slide for the first time.

But, what would happen if the spirits here grew out of control? There were stories in many cultures, about mythical entities that wanted humans to come play with them for all eternity, fairies and such. The stories were not happy ones. It wouldn’t surprise her if those stories had been inspired by real spirits, who grew too large and powerful, invaded the physical world, and started to spread their influence. All of a sudden, the old fairy tales she knew about, the ones with strange and obtuse creatures, seemed like very real possibilities.

She and the wolves moved on. She guided them along the streets, and she kept her eyes along the houses they moved past. Surely one of the houses had to have it. Maybe—

“Oh, there! There!” She pointed to a nearby house, and the bedroom window that overlooked the street. The houses in this area were a bit small, and crammed together, with little in the way of lawns. This district belonged to the Carthians, more or less, as it was right next to the urban areas with the apartments and convenience stores. On a normal shopping day, people in this neighborhood would drive out to the urban area if they wanted clothes, or technology. But the neighborhood was still far away enough that it was quiet, and the only noise she could remember through the day had been from kids playing outside, or a school bus driving by.

The wolves trotted up the driveway of the house. In the Hisil, the driveway had no cracks or dents, but was a smooth black color and shape, as if it was made of plastic. No car in the driveway; none of the driveways had cars, now that she thought about it. A lack of cars was a consistent thing in Shadow Dolareido, though the occasional wheel thing drove by, a concoction of asphalt and tires, with eyes that looked like headlights. She saw many of those in the center of South Side, but out in the suburbs, they were rare.

“Hello!” she called to the window.

The glowing orb hovered over to the window, and flapped one of its angel wings at her. It opened the window with what Tash guessed were tiny arms hidden in the glow of its spherical body, and it flew down to her.

“Hello!” it said, in a high pitched voice. “Uratha? And Kindred. Are ... are you here for me?”

“N-No! No. Um, not really. I uh ... I’m s-sorry, I ... uh ... did we meet? M-My boss, she ... she summoned a spirit like you before, and—”

“Oh! Oh oh. I know you. Friend spoke of you, spoke of visit to Gurihal. Do you want to speak to Safe of Grey Street?”

“Grey Street?” She clapped a couple times, before she forced down her rising giggles. “That’s where my home is.”

“Safe of Grey Street has spoken of their visit. And they spoke of you. They’ve visited you before, hiding in Twilight while you were young. I will take you to them.”

Safe had visited her before? Spirits could sneak into the physical world, she knew that, and hide in Twilight; Twilight was what she and the Prince spent a lot of time investigating. And if it was her necklace that summoned Safe to the Prince’s tower, it didn’t surprise her that Safe must have visited her when she was human, her, and other kids who felt safe in their homes.

Without questioning it, the Uratha and Kindred began to follow the hovering, spherical angel creature. Natasha was still on Matthew’s back, so she got to spend her time looking around and taking in as many details as she could. It was true the city looked empty at first glance, as the suburbs usually did at night, but the more she kept her eyes open, the more she spotted movement. A slithering serpent creature went into a drain along the street curb. Several crows flew by, each of varying sizes that were comically different; one might as well have been the size of an albatross. There was a raccoon, but as usual with the animal spirits, it had didn’t look quite like a normal raccoon. Its tail was bigger, fluffier, its body leaner and more sly, and unless her eyes were deceiving her, its hands looked more like human hands wearing black gloves than a raccoon’s hands.

There were other things too. Dolareido’s Hisil sky was a bizarre display of colors, especially in the center of South Side, but out here it looked a bit less crazy, a bit more natural. But there was no denying that one could tell the direction to the entertainment district of South Side by looking at the sky, and seeing where the warped lighting patterns were bleeding into the clouds.