Chapter 109

~~Author’s Note~~

Sorry this action scene is taking so long. It’s really been dragging! But it’s building up to something pretty big, and a lot of details needed to be explored; they’ll be relevant later. Give it a couple more chapters and we’ll be back to the world of Dolareido.

~~Damien~~

He didn’t have to say anything. The moment he curled his finger against the small hole in the soot, and opened the barrier, the crows above began to squawk, caw, and attack. Damien worked quickly, spreading the soot apart until one, two, three feet of open earth awaited him. Thankfully, the amber circle was rendered completely useless by being broken, but the soot apparently still worked as a barrier from either direction, as his fingers attested; it blocked all matter from both sides, but when his fingers touched the powder itself from the inside of the invisible wall, it gave way. He had to make sure the break was wide.

The crows, who had hidden in the forest, hiding their numbers in the shadow and sinister wood, unleashed the swarm. The legion descended upon Damien, and flew through the break in the barrier over his head. Made sense; they wouldn’t be able to see the black powder way high up in the sky, with branches and darkness hiding it. But it did mean he had to plant himself flat to the ground and ledge of the ditch, covering his head with his hands, as the birds flew through the hole, shrieking and squawking.

The four hunters lifted their heads, eyes wide, surprised, and maybe a little afraid. But the fear disappeared under reflexes, training, and Lord only knew how many years of hate and loathing. The one with the flamethrower unleashed Hell, and Damien had to throw himself back and away into the forest again, disappearing behind trees as fire lit up the hole in the barrier he’d made. Feathers went up in flames, and the smell of burned flesh filled Damien’s nostrils. Bullets ripped up the ground, shredding the hole Damien had made, and again the Mekhet found himself hiding as the hail of gunfire continued until dozens, hundreds of bullets were crashing against the bark around him.

He peeked his head out, and watched. Wrapped in his Cloak of Night, the hunters wouldn’t be able to see him. Except, Jeremiah, Angela, and Elen had proven they were quite capable of handling paranormal threats. Perhaps they could see him, if he got too close, thanks to their tattoo symbols, or maybe the necklaces and bracelets they wore. The four hunters were as likely a threat, but they were distracted, all four sets of eyes locked onto the ditch Clara had dug, and burying it in metal and fire.

Angela, Elen, and Jeremiah, on the other hand, did not break from their task. Now they stood within a new circle, one Angela was finishing drawing with what looked like chalk. Amber. That blasted amber line again. But it seemed like they didn’t have anymore of the black soot anymore; powerful stuff, absurdly powerful, and thank the Lord he didn’t have to deal with anymore of it. The amber line wouldn’t block a bullet.

He looked to Jack, and shivered at the sight of the kid. Auspex showed the same thing as before, that the boy’s aura had exploded into something massive, angry, violent, and bloodthirsty. It was a rage Damien could not begin to understand, could not put into context, and could not appreciate. It was the rage of a psychopath, of a broken mind that didn’t think like a normal person.

No, it was the rage of the Beast, the sheer animal aggression and desire for violence that existed within him, and all Kindred. Except, only a draugr was so consumed with a need to destroy, and even then, draugr were mindless, stupid animals. Jack was unleashing the worst his Beast had to offer, and one of the most powerful creatures Damien had ever seen, the gargoyle Horror, was getting destroyed by it.

It was a strange sight, to see the small boy physically punch something with enough force to break steel. He didn’t have the mass to anchor the force into the ground, and it launched him back, or in this case, down. Down gave the kid a better anchor, and the driving upward force the blood-coated man sank into the gargoyle’s chest was so strong, it fell backward again, landing with a resounding crash. There was a dent in its chest.

And Jack, wearing his crimson armor, laughed the entire time.

Damien forced his eyes back to the hunters. Jack was busy with the gargoyle, Triss was wrecked, Clara was beyond wrecked, and Othello was out of commission. If the branch that skewered him had been any bigger, Damien would have feared for his second life. A small stroke of luck that it wasn’t. A huge stroke of misfortune, that Damien was now on his own, and without his sword.

Elen drew symbols in the air with her knife, and the symbols stuck. As if she was cutting into the fabric of reality itself and making it bleed, her glowing red knife left burning blood-red lines in the night air. They burned, but not with fire. They burned the way flesh did, when it was sick and inflamed, when it was infected, or when it’d had time to fight against the damage of a wound. A dull, pulsing red that had no business glowing in the dark, but it did.

Angela came in close to Jeremiah, and hugged an arm around the man’s waist. She kissed the man’s cheek, like a daughter might a father, and looked down at the book in the old man’s hands as he opened it once again. Pain. Sadness. Worry. The host of emotions the old man carried, and shared with the woman next to him, were immense and uncountable. The trials those two must have faced to look at each other that way, was almost enough for Damien to sympathize for them. They were friends, together until the end.

Damien did not like humanizing them, but there it was. Next to Jack, or the thing currently controlling Jack, Jeremiah and Angela looked like reasonable people, driven and determined. Only Elen continued to seem the monster.

The crows died by the hundreds. When one hunter stopped to reload, another started shooting, a seamless and unending stream of destruction. They had the magazines of their fallen hunters, and a small hole to cover. There was no getting in there.

The black powder seemed to block incoming matter high and low, which meant that now that the line was broken, he could get in from above where he’d broken it, from high above if necessary. The crows were figuring that out as well, and slowly expanding the height of their incoming swarm as they learned where the hole was. Some still hit the invisible barrier, and when a bird flies into essentially unbreakable glass at high speeds, it’s a death sentence. But the crows couldn’t be slow either, not with the four hunters unloading bullet after bullet, and waves of flame.

Damien looked up and down the invisible hole through the barrier, and anchored his weight onto the balls of his feet and his fingertips. The crows were showing him the path, all he had to do was jump with them, or over them. He could jump pretty damn high, ten, twenty, maybe thirty feet high if he had the time to prepare his vitae. And he did have that time, the crows were providing it, them and the demon curse who was simultaneously controlling them, while fighting a titan.

A quick glance down, a check of his pistol, the magazine, the safety, and he was off. He put every bit of strength into the jump, poured vitae into his legs until he felt his hunger rise, and he did the same for his Cloak, masking himself as best he could. This was what Daniel had been trying to teach him, multitasking, how to use Obfuscate while going on the offensive in combination with Celerity. A juggling act, and a demanding one, like juggling cement blocks.

He flew through the air, pulled his legs and arms in, and sailed between the walls of the invisible barrier. Impressively, he’d managed to get above the crows, too. Not so impressively, was how his high jump meant he had a hell of a drop to make. And, most unfortunately, it became obvious as he went through the barrier and into clearing, that the hunters had set up a trap.

He fell not too far from where the four hunters stood within the newer, smaller amber circle. It was wide enough for the seven of them to stand and move comfortably around some big stones, each a couple feet high, but not so large that it included the sacrificial trees of the clearing, or the stone altar that stood halfway between the trees and the clearing’s center. Elen continued to write strange symbols into the air, and Jeremiah continued to read from his book. Engrossed as they were, Damien could have probably run up to them and started shooting, and they wouldn’t have stopped what they were doing. Angela, on the other hand, lifted her head, and looked toward him. Not directly at him, but toward him and where he landed. It seemed his Cloak had not been perfect.

Strange movement drew his eyes, and Damien, crouched low in the shallow grass, looked to the nearest tree, one of the trees with a sacrifice crucified upon its thick, twisted trunk of black bark. The body, naked and eviscerated, with three nails jammed through its limbs, looked at him. Cold, empty eyes looked at him, directly at him, and with slow, twitching movements, the corpse opened its mouth.

“There,” one of the corpses said.

Another raised its head, her head, and looked at him. “There.”

“There.”

“There.”

“There!”

The voices of the dead. The voices of cracked, dry throats, and withered tongues. The voices of bags of skin, with nothing inside them but drying organs. Raspy, harsh, and louder than they should have been. Like, screaming banshees.

Angela wasn’t looking at him, but near him, and through him. She was looking at where the faces were looking, and doing some quick and poor triangulation. Poor triangulation was enough, when she pulled out a shotgun, a sawed-off shotgun, and started firing in his general direction.

He dove to the side and around one of the trees, but not before one of the hunters near Angela unloaded a couple dozen bullets in his direction as well. While Angela missed, the other hunter managed to clip his leg, and he spun as he fell down. Pain, a mountain of screaming pain brought his Cloak to a quick end, and Damien yelled between clenched teeth as he slid behind the tree. Two bullets had caught his shin and calf, and he could see bits of bone through his pant leg.

Concentrate. Fucking concentrate! You need to move. Be faster. Ignore the wound. Think!

He scanned the area around him, and ducked close to the tree as a swarm of bullets started to rip into it. Worse was the shotgun. Click, click, boom. It didn’t damage the tree as much as a penetrating bullet, but it damaged a square foot of area, instead of a single spot. If Damien made one misstep, he’d take dozens of pellets to the body, and that was infinitely worse than a few bullets from a rifle cutting clean through him. He edged his head out from behind cover, only to have bullets tear through wood and bark near his eye. Three hunters remained to cover the hole in the barrier, and they tore through the hundreds of crows, until the birds’ corpses decorated the black and bloodied earth like a garden of death. One hunter plus one Angela kept their guns pointed at him, and they were more than enough to keep him stuck behind the tree.

Except, if he was behind the tree, and the group of hunters were inside their small circle in the center of the clearing, that meant he could approach the outer line of black soot without exposing himself too much. It was a fat tree, the one he was hiding behind, big enough for a corpse to be crucified to it; damn corpse wouldn’t shut up, yelling ‘here here’ over and over. But, if he backed away from it, and kept its thick trunk between him and the hunters, he could break the magic black line yet again. To what purpose, though. To get back outside the circle and render his efforts pointless?

Movement rustled some bushes, and he snapped his head back to look into the darkness, beyond the black line, and out into the forest. Jack? No, Jack was still creating a ruckus, butting heads with the juggernaut. Clara, Triss, Othello? He doubted one minute was enough for any of them to recover. Aaron or Jennifer? Jennifer was guarding her hunter prisoners, and wouldn’t disobey the cursed Jack. Maybe Aaron, but Damien doubted it. The man was logical, and didn’t let whims of emotion dictate actions. Aaron had made a tactical decision and would stick to it. Fiona? Athalia? They were supposed to help, and he desperately needed it, but—

Harcourt stuck his head out from behind a tree. He must have snuck away from the destruction, and now stood behind and between the many standing trees near the invisible barrier. Maybe ninety degrees of the huge barrier was now between Harcourt and Jack. He must have been sneaking along through the dark and chaos for some time, and he was better at it than Damien would have assumed, for him to not notice the hunter.

The hunter met Damien’s eyes, and showed his pistol. The pistol drew Damien’s attention for only a moment. It was the hunter’s eyes that struck Damien still with surprise. He recognized those eyes, he’d seen them in others, others who’d been wronged, who knew people who’d been wronged, and wanted a chance at revenge.

Elen had killed his friends. The people he’d trusted had killed his friends. Fellow humans, who’d fought beside him to kill the monsters of the night, had killed his friends, and left him alone in a den of monsters. The man was probably angry now, angry down to his soul, and hurting for a chance at payback.

Damien dragged himself toward the man, doing his best to keep the tree between him and the hunters in their circle. They could step out of it anytime they wanted, and pour bullets into him, if they realized what he was doing. Considering things could leave the circle without issue, a spray of bullets could get Harcourt killed as well if he came into the clearing through the original break Damien had made. Right now, Damien needed an ally, and that meant he needed to make a new hole in the wall.

He cloaked himself as best he could, ignored the pain in his leg, and approached Harcourt. Once he was close, Harcourt could see him; a downward flick of the hunter’s eyes, spotting Damien along the grass well before he should have proved that. Whether the man was trained to notice disturbances in the ground, or his tattoos and bracelets and whatnot allowed him to see Damien earlier than he should have been able to, Damien didn’t know. Maybe he could ask him when this was all over, assuming they lived.

Damien kicked out the black soot, and Harcourt came into the circle, quiet and slow. Where Damien had seen a goofy expression before, now he found only hardness. He’d be able to use this man, rely on him, and make an attempt for Jeremiah. Or Elen. Or Angela. Any of them. Better to not be picky at this rate. They were on their last legs.

“This is for Carver, you fucking assholes!” Angry as the man was, and skilled as he was, he was not professional; professionally trained, but not professionally behaved. He stuck his head out from behind the tree Damien had been using, and began to unleash rage as bullets aimed for his fellow hunters.

A gunfight in the darkness was difficult. No one had night vision, save for what the paranormals managed naturally, but the hunters had flashlights. All Damien had was a phone he could use for light, and he’d turned that off not long after entering the nightmare. Harcourt had a light under his pistol though, and he used it, getting down onto a knee and aiming it at the hunters as he fired at them. He had better form than Damien did.

But he didn’t have a vampire’s reflexes. Damien grabbed his shoulder, and yanked him back behind the tree after he shot thrice. Bullets shredded the side of the tree Harcout was behind, and the man cursed as he pressed his back to the wood. Lights shined along the grass on either side of them, like prison spotlights.

“Thanks. Fuck me, can’t line up a shot in the dark. When I try and aim at them, I get light in the eyes.”

Damien nodded. “Yes, but the hunters are exposed, and occupied with the crows.”

“Not completely exposed. They’ve got a couple rocks to duck behind.”

True, they did, but not the rock with the slab of skin on it, the largest in the clearing.

The altar. If assaulting the hunters would be too difficult now that Damien was injured, without his sword, and running low on bullets, then maybe he should change his target. Adjust tactics, change the goal, adapt to the situation.

“Brace, what do you know about that slab of skin on the altar.”

“Fuck me, I don’t know shit.”

“It has to do with Sándor.”

“The monster? Then I guess it’s probably how Elen’s got him under her spell. She had to carve symbols into his back regularly, you know? Like every few months.”

“Any idea where the skin came from? Whose it is?”

The man shrugged. The motion must have brushed outside the cover of the tree, as a few bullets shredded past the bark and skimmed along the skin of his arm. “Fuck. Uh, if I had to guess, it’s probably ... his?”

Sándor’s skin. The Begotten merged with their Horrors in the nightmare, so how would one get his skin into the nightmare? Considering Elen seemed to be a master of flesh, she likely removed it from Sándor outside the nightmare, in her flesh chamber, and brought it into the nightmare, all as part of her ritual to control the man and his connection to the Horror. Twisted and sick. And impressive. Damien doubted there were many witches or shamans in the world who knew such a spell, let alone had managed to perform it.

“If I were in good condition, I’d assault the hunters directly,” Damien said. “But—”

“They’re not hunters.”

“I—alright, the ... the...”

“Traitors.”

Damien smiled. “Alright. The traitors have those ... corpses, on the trees, to guide their fire to me. I need a distraction, and a powerful one, if I’m to reach the altar.” He gestured down to his damaged leg. “And I’m afraid I won’t be as fast as I’d like to be.” The blasted leg was refusing to heal, and he knew why. Such constant use of his Obfuscate and Celerity left him drained, and running on fumes. He didn’t have time for this.

Part of him was tempted to drain the hunter in front of him. He didn’t need to kill Harcourt, but a stomach full of the man’s blood would go a long way to helping Damien out. But, no, the Kiss took a few moments, and it didn’t heal instantly. The man was more useful to him conscious and armed.

“So, I need to keep them occupied.”

“Yes, and—” A noise had Damien turning around, ready to shoot or tear open whatever was trying to sneak up behind him. Relief washed over him, as he looked down, and smiled at the two crows hopping along the grass. “Mulder. Scully. You two are far too smart for your own good.”

“The fuck?”

“Jack’s pet crows.”

“He’s got a million pet crows!”

“These two are special.” Damien nodded toward the hole in the barrier they came through, the second hole Damien had made, and gestured to it with his free hand. “If you can summon what remains of your army to distract the hunters, I’d—”

And they left. They didn’t fly, probably putting two and two together that flying in this environment was a great way to invite a hailstorm of bullets. They hopped out of the break in the line Damien had made, cawed a few times, and ... and came back. They stayed low to the ground until their breast feathers pressed to the grass, and lower, like nesting chickens. And they started to walk outward, each bird taking one half of the line, and dusting it apart as the waddled.

In the darkness, clouds above combined by a canopy of horrible branches, the birds were surrounded in nigh perfect shadow. And they were crows. They were black from beak to tail feathers, and from eye to claw. They were twenty feet away and Damien struggled to see them.

“Smart birds,” Harcourt whispered.

“Indeed.” They didn’t have long to wait, but it didn’t take long. The two crows went slowly, but slowly was quick enough to open the hole from two feet, to four, to six, to eight, to ten feet wide in short order. And once the hole in the barrier was spread wide, movement in the branches above signaled the invasion.

He’d underestimated Jack. As if the scene in the hospital, a display straight out of Hell, hadn’t been enough to convince Damien that the curse possessing the boy was something absurd. As if seeing it summon a legion to lead their assault on the hunters’ strange room of flesh hadn’t been enough. As if watching the boy fight the gargoyle, a monster proving to be a titan of durability and strength, straight on hadn’t been enough. As if learning that the boy was simultaneously guiding his swarm of crows, while fighting the giant monster hadn’t been enough, now he could see that Jack had continued to summon yet even more crows than Damien had known about.

It’d gone past absurd, and into the surreal, that the curse could do this much. These hunters, or at least Jeremiah and his two female companions, had enough tools and skills at their disposal, that they could have defeated any nest of vampires in a city with enough time and patience. Elders would have perished to this ridiculous assortment of enchantments, rituals, and strange magics they had acquired and mastered. The professional military training of the hunters, the weapons, and the sheer drive of Jeremiah, would have bested all but perhaps the Prince or Jacob. The hunters deserved to win this fight, and to succeed on this hunt for Azamel. The only reason they wouldn’t, was Jack, and the curse.

Jack had said there’d been a memory, something carried over from his curse, that showed a man of the cloth, a Kindred of the Lancea et Sanctum, sealing the curse inside the original carrier Susanna. That was something he’d have to look into harder, because the cruel reality that the curse was strong enough to do whatever the fuck it wanted to anyone, including the Prince, or the sheriff, or Jacob, was quickly sinking in. For now, it was helping them. Who knew what it’d want to do tomorrow night.

Damien checked the slide on his pistol, and nodded to Harcourt. “More crows will be joining us.”

“More!?” the man said.

Damien nodded again, and ran.

“Fuuuuuuuck!” Harcourt stuck out from behind the tree, this time from the other side, and started shooting. When he did, he unleashed the swarm.

Damien didn’t look back. He couldn’t. Every ounce of effort, energy, vitae, and concentration was in this sprint. He could feel his punctured leg damage itself further with the harsh impact of his shoes against the dirt. He could feel his Cloak of Night envelop him. He could hear the voices of the corpses as they shouted in his direction, despite the Cloak. He could hear the crows erupt, a cawing horde that launched from their branches in such numbers, it drowned out the sound of Jack and his brawl with the gargoyle.

He felt vitae course through his limbs as his Kindred half used Celerity, breaching through normal physics and using the almost magical properties of Kindred blood to push him past speeds he shouldn’t have been able to hit. But even so, the hunters began to shoot at him, two of them. The one with the flamethrower turned their attention, but not to him, thank Longinus. Fire poured toward Harcourt, and higher, up into the sky to rain down the liquid flame upon the black, feathered locusts that entered the clearing.

Scully and Mulder must have continued clearing away the magical black powder, because the width of the swarm grew, until Damien could not resist peeking over his shoulder. It was a black cloud, blurring with the darkness of the night.

Damien forced his eyes back onto the ground ahead of him. Without his own light source, the darkness was enough for Kindred eyes to struggle to find footing, and he could not stop. Only the wild lights of the hunters scanning for him, and the wilder flames filling the air, provided light for him to use, and they tricked his eyes with fast shadows, as much as illuminated his path. As hunters unleashed bullets toward Harcourt, and bullets toward the two streams of crows flowing into their clearing, two continued to shoot at Damien. Celerity would not have been enough to avoid their gunfire, slowed as he was by his injury. And, the hunters, at least these four and Angela, were good shots. They kept their lights toward him, and every time one foot landed on the grass, they unleashed a spray of bullets. Only the chaos of the crows made his plan work.

If he ran at them, he’d be riddled with bullets. If he paused to try and shoot back at them, he’d likely be shot as well. All these actions that required him to ground his weight and change momentum weren’t viable, with his leg threatening to cease functioning. But they weren’t his goal. As long as he ran the perimeter of the clearing, staying far away from the hunters within its center, they wouldn’t be able to get a good shot at him, and he’d be able to approach his true target.

The largest rock in the clearing was the fat one, easily five feet wide, and slanted, providing an inward-facing slope where Elen had placed the large flap of skin. The new circle they’d drawn in amber, to protect themselves from supernatural forces and bodies, hadn’t been large enough to include it. While the hunters had a decent enough circle to move around in, maybe twenty feet across, with several large rocks within to use as cover, the enormous one that had to be an altar, was left beyond its embrace. Perhaps it was because it didn’t sit directly between all the trees with corpses attached to them. It became obvious now, as he circled them as fast as he could, that the seven remaining hunters had drawn their circle where they did, because it was directly between all the trees used as crucifixes. Whatever they were doing, they were going to be in the center of it.

It was beyond frustrating. The hunters were mostly out in the open, and if given a moment, Damien would have been able to find a vantage point, and simply shoot them from a distance. But the barrier, the gargoyle, the rushed circumstance, the corpses announcing his position, it made everything a panicked mess of unknowns. All he could do with what he had left, was this.

He ran the perimeter harder, hard enough he felt the torn flesh of his leg rip under the flexing muscles. For all their tools, for all their skill, the humans were human. His body was damaged, his vitae was running out, but he was still faster than they were, and he still managed to pull up at least some degree of a Cloak. He was a blur for them, nothing more than a flickering shadow in the darkness that they were trying to catch with their flashlights. Trying, and failing.

He slid hard, good leg out in front of him, body twisted to face the hunters, and left hand down to catch his weight as he came to a hard stop. It gave his position away, and invited a hail of bullets, but they turned into sparks of collision as he put the grand altar rock between him and them.

He didn’t stop for long. The crows above had managed to fully enter the clearing, so a tornado of feathers circled everything within, but they did not cross the amber line. Could they not? They were influenced by supernatural means, so, maybe they couldn’t, or maybe they couldn’t easily. They were trying, but as they swam down upon the hunters, they were forced to pull away, or pushed away, by invisible waves.

The fire raged. The hunter with the flamethrower didn’t care that wood and grass burned, and they unleashed the stream into the air without limit. Birds caught on fire, and soon their swirling mass became a mix of black feathers and red flames. The smell of burning flesh and cooking meat filled the air, and Damien grimaced as he ducked down, avoiding bullets that skimmed along his protecting rock altar, while burning wings flew overhead. The grass, the forest, it resisted the flame, as if it didn’t belong. It didn’t. Would the nightmare chamber heal, once the chaos was done? Maybe it would, but for the moment, the fire was winning that battle, and the birds were only making it worse.

A loud crash summoned his gaze. Behind him, Jack continued his fight with the nightmare’s owner. It looked silly when only glanced at for a second, a tiny boy fighting a colossus, but Damien spared an extra second to watch longer, and the cruel, absurd, and visceral reality sank it, of Jack’s disturbing display of power. The gargoyle had slammed Jack into the invisible barrier again, and was punching him over and over, one hand braced against the barrier, another against the ground, while it used two of its enormous fists to punch the boy like a furious bread maker.

Jack shrugged the blows off after taking five of them, and met one of the punches with his own. Small as he was, his punches were to the gargoyle as a framing hammer would be to human flesh, and again Damien could hear an audible snap as something inside the titan cracked. The following roar was deafening, but quieter than Damien had predicted. His hearing was starting to suffer.

The cursed boy looked over his shoulder to the clearing, and noticed Damien’s position. “Damien! Do it!”

“Fucking touch that,” one of the hunters said as they reloaded their magazine, “and I’ll fill you with so much lead, you’ll—” And down they went, the woman letting out a screech as she fell onto her stomach.