Chapter 110

~~Beatrice~~

Heal, damn it, heal! She didn’t have time for this. The climax was happening, the end point, the big, inevitable moment where shit was going to be decided. No way, no god damn motherfucking way was she going to miss it. More than not miss it, she was going to be a part of it. She was perfectly fine not being the one to defeat Angela, as long as she got to be a part of killing her.

Vitae poured through her legs, until the bones were in place, and the muscles connected enough that she could stand on them. She sank her claws into the nearest tree, and dragged herself to standing, eyes on the clearing and the apocalyptic chaos within. Holy fucking shit. Fire was everywhere, and while she could see the nightmare was fighting the flame, like wet wood might, the unending flame the hunter had spread eventually got the upper hand. The clearing was catching fire, and she couldn’t tell if it’d spread beyond. If it did, well, fuck her.

The crows were on fire, too. How Jack had managed to summon so many, she was sure she’d never know, other than that the curse was something fucking nasty strong. He’d summoned more during this whole fiasco, and now those crows were circling around the hunters, like a fucking tornado. Now that Damien was down, and the gargoyle was gone, the hunters were free to focus on the birds. The rifles didn’t do much, but every shot of Angela’s shotgun took down half a dozen or more. It was raining feathers and bird corpses.

And Jack just watched. The kid wasn’t too far from Triss, standing by a chunk of the invisible wall with arms folded across his chest, and a big grin on his face. His shirt was gone at this point, and his pants were full of tears, but still on. It was kind of badass, seeing how ripped the little twerp was in a setting and situation like this. And scary. He was enjoying this. He was enjoying watching the hunters fight off panic and a thousand crows at the same time. The fact his army was dying by the droves didn’t bother him at all.

“Now what?” Jack said, loud enough they could all hear it over the dying birds and gunfire. “Your enforcer is gone, free of your spell. Most of your barrier is gone and—” the boy glanced down, laughed, and stepped forward. The barrier, or at least where it was in front of him, no longer was. Movement skittered along his feet, black shadows in the darkness. Mulder and Scully, if Triss had to guess. Smart birds, to not perch on his shoulders like usual, with all the bullets flying around. “And your barrier is gone. You think your protection circle is going to stop me?”

“Fire will,” the hunter with the flamethrower said, and predictably, unleashed a wave of flame toward Jack. Flamethrowers could shoot far, very far; Kindred were right to fear them.

The mighty Jack jumped back, and disappeared into the dark forest. Despite the sheer destruction the kid and the gargoyle had created, there was still plenty of forest. Hell, unless her eyes were deceiving her, Triss was sure some of the forest was reforming around them. The dark, twisted, fucking horrible trees were everywhere, and Jack didn’t have to go far to vanish into the black.

The birds were fading away, the tornado of wings and squawks of pain dying down as Jack’s army died off. But as the birds bled away, the hunter with the flamethrower let out a shrieking curse, as the fuel nozzle went dry. She turned off the ignition flame, threw the gun and pack to the ground, took one of the rifles, and readied her shot. But Jack didn’t reemerge from the wood.

“Knew that was going to happen eventually.” Laughing, Jack moved through the forest. Triss couldn’t see him, but his voice moved, a vague direction she could only guess was now the other side of the clearing, across from her. “So now what? This fire won’t last forever, and then I’m going to get you. Gonna getcha. Gonna fuckin getcha.”

Christ, he was a creepy bastard. It wouldn’t have been so bad if the curse had simply been vindictive, angry, vengeful, and full of wrath. This curse thing was a twisted fuck, worse than Jacob.

Triss stared through the flames at Damien. From where he’d fallen, he was mostly safe from the hunters, with that giant altar rock between him and them. He was on his back, flat to the ground, and he wasn’t moving. The fire wasn’t spreading as fast as it could have, so if the Mekhet got a little lucky, he was safe from the flames for a minute or two. And if the hunters didn’t step out of their circle to try and finish him off, he might recover enough to wake up from his torpor, and drag himself to safety. Most likely, he’d be stuck in torpor, and someone else was going to have to drag him to safety.

Fiona would. Fiona would get him to safety, take him back to the real world, and give him a drink. Where the fuck was she? Where the fuck was Athalia, too?

Triss snarled and dragged her claws down the bark of the tree. Athalia. That bitch had probably tied up Fiona somehow, and left her somewhere where she couldn’t help. Then she’d come back, and watch and wait, until she had an opportunity to save her daughter. And it wasn’t like Triss would be able to stop her, fucked up as she was. Her insides were on fire, rib bones stabbing into shit, and the cut she’d given to herself earlier was threatening to burst open. All that was background noise to how her legs were one bad step from cracking in half.

It didn’t matter. If she had to kill Athalia to reach her goal, then she would.

“Clara,” Triss said, getting down onto her knees. Ok, yeah, crawling was easier. Getting down wasn’t so easy, but once she had her weight on her knees, she breathed a sigh of relief as the pressure eased off her bones and insides. “Clara.”

The werewolf was conscious. Better than conscious, Clara looked at her as she too got onto her knees. The two of them were behind a fallen tree, so most of their bodies were hidden from the eyes of the hunters, but not hidden from the fire. The invisible wall was dying off, and as it did, the fire the hunter with the flamethrower had been spreading, spread further. Shit, maybe she was wrong about Damien, and someone had to get him, now.

“Clara, get up.”

“I ... getting...” Her snout struggled to make human sounds, eventually gave up, and forced herself to lift her head. “Fire.”

“Yeah, fire. A lot of fucking fire. Damien’s in the middle of it, and I need you to get him out. Othello too, before the fire gets them.”

“Othello?”

Triss motioned to the giant circle of destruction the kid and the gargoyle had made. On one of the branches, pretty damn high up, dangled the vampire in torpor.

“I can barely move,” Triss said, “let alone get through the fire. Get Damien and Othello to safety.”

Snarling, the werewolf shook her head and looked around. “Gargoyle. Hunters.”

“Most of the hunters are dead, remember? The gargoyle’s free of the control spell and it’s gone. And Jack ... Jack will handle the rest of them.” Much as she tried to act calm, a glance in the direction Jack had vanished was enough to get her shaking. She didn’t need Auspex to feel the fucking animal rage and hunger coming from the curse. It’d only grown worse as the night had gone on, and the aura exploded when Jack had gone full blood-armor mode. She could feel it, and she knew Clara could feel it.

“I ... should help Jack.” As if she hadn’t been injured at all, Clara hunched low behind the fallen tree, like she was prowling, and looked into the clearing. The fire raged, a strange back-and-forth between the nightmare’s desire to return to its original shape, and the sheer amount of flame. If it weren’t for the nightmare’s ... nightmary self, the whole forest would have become a raging inferno already.

“Jack will be fine. Damien and Othello might fucking die! Help them.” She tried, oh she fucking tried, to not snarl at the damn wolf. Pissing off a giant werewolf creature was not a good idea, especially when Triss wouldn’t be able to defend herself.

She was tempted to make a comment about the werewolf’s attraction to Jack, and how it was probably clouding her vision, especially now that she was transformed and likely a hormone and rage-fueled unstoppable juggernaut. Well, not unstoppable. The fucking gargoyle saw to that, but the gargoyle was gone, and without that fucker, the hunters were outmatched, outgunned, and already defeated.

Except, they weren’t. They were obviously up to something. Jack saw it, and would pounce the moment the opportunity presented itself. But the curse didn’t give a shit about Othello, and probably didn’t give a shit about Damien either. Christ, how fucking horrible would Jack feel, if Damien died when he could have done something to help, but the curse just didn’t give a shit. Yeah, Clara had to help them.

“Fine.” With animal grace, the werewolf crouched low, got on all fours, and started to prowl along. For a moment, Triss thought she might transform into something else, like one of her more wolfy forms, but then she wouldn’t have hands. Needed hands for a rescue mission. Maybe Harcourt could help? The man was still hiding behind a tree in the clearing, and had obviously helped Damien. If—

The sky exploded in fire. Triss threw up her hands to block the light from her eyes, snarling and hissing as if she’d been hit by sunlight. Kindred eyes adapted quickly, but for a split second, she couldn’t see a fucking thing around her except searing amber light. After the screaming pain in her retinas passed, she managed to lower her hand.

“What ... the fuck...”

There was Azamel! In the fucking sky, with all six of her limbs spread out. Azamel, the giant fucking elephant creature. Her, all of her, was in the mother fucking sky, and directly overhead the hunters. She was horizontal, as if lying on a surface, except hanging, and pointed down at the ground; her elephant trunk was dangling with gravity, down toward the hunters. Good fucking god, she must have been fifty feet in the air. The strange things she’d held in her four hands, last time Triss had gotten a glimpse of her, were gone.

Symbols were drawn around her, into the air by her limbs as if drawn on whatever surface she was attached to. Elen’s symbols. Amber, glowing cuffs were shackled to the giant elephant creature’s wrists, securing her to the night sky. If they gave, the enormous monster would have fallen and flattened the humans underneath her. The mighty Horror ... no, not Horror. That was Azamel. Triss could feel it. This wasn’t the shadow or whatever of the Begotten, this was her, genuinely her. And she trumpeted in pain, a blasting sound that filled the whole nightmare with its alien noise. Not if a hundred trombones had been blown at full volume, would it sound like the horrible noise that came out of the elephant monster, or as loud.

Jeremiah raised the book in his hand, and closed it with a grand thump. Fucking dramatic asshole.

“And so it comes to this!” he yelled, holding up both hands, book in his left, as he looked up at the giant creature overhead. “I did not want to do this, Azamel. This soul ritual will be the death of us, you and I!”

Soul ritual? Death? Fuck. Fuck fuck. They’d guessed right, then. Jeremiah was going to do something that’d get him killed, in order to kill Azamel. What a predictable fucking cunt. In his mind, he was a hero, sacrificing his life and the lives of his soldiers, in order to wipe a great evil from the world. Sack of shit.

Azamel trumpeted again, and Triss covered her ears, trying to block out the sound as best she could. It didn’t help much. The Begotten thrashed, pulled against the bindings, trumpeted again, and Triss fell to her stomach as the sound ripped through her. Ow, ow ow ow.

Jeremiah pointed a finger up at the monster above. “Struggle all you want. You will pay for the things you’ve done!” The fire raged around the man and his hunters, but did nothing to drown out the sound of his voice. It was as if he was standing at the nose of a ship, and his voice bellowed out to everyone around him, a ship floating in a sea of fire, beneath a burning, cursed sun.

“Soul ritual?” the elephant monster asked, booming voice matching Jeremiah’s.

“Do you think I chained and bound a Begotten to my cause, and have spent years working with Elen, to play this idiotic game of cat and mouse in this city? My daughter convinced me that maybe we could kill you the old fashioned way, monster. But...” Sighing, a noise they could all hear despite the fire and the squawking of dying crows, Jeremiah reached for the knife Elen held out for him, before he gave Angela a parting nod. “We are bound, old monster. And I will see you dead before the end.”

The psycho gave the big book to Elen, held the knife in one hand, and fished something out of a pocket with his other. A lock of hair. A lock of hair?

“I gave that to you, long ago.” Again the elephant’s voice boomed over the fire, the clearing, and the dark forest beneath her. “You’ve kept it all this time?” The anger in her voice vanished. It was still an elephant talking, though its mouth did not move, and the voice was anything but an old woman’s. But, the anger was gone, replaced with something sad, and even a little tender.

Harcourt poked his head out from behind his tree, only to have a dozen bullets slam into the bark beside it. Poor guy ducked behind cover again, ass to the grass and half surrounded by fire. It didn’t scare him all that much, hot as it must have been. For Kindred, being around all this fire was terrifying, and Triss had to fight against her Beast’s urge to flee every second she was here. Just touching the red flame would burn through skin and turn it into ash in half a second. The true fear, was if she actually caught fire. One mistake and she’d be up in flames like kindling, and that’d kill any Kindred, including an unprepared Elder, in literal seconds.

“I’ve kept it. And now, with the sacrifices made, I can use this nightmare to ensnare you, old friend. So many lives sacrificed, to be the bedrock, the foundation of this ritual. But you forced me, forced my hand.” Sighing yet again, a long and exhausted sound that carried far more years than any human should have been carrying, Jeremiah lifted the knife, and tuft of hair.

Triss started to move toward the clearing, crawling along her belly. The asshole was acting as if everyone else had ceased to exist, as if two vampires, a werewolf, and a rather angry hunter, weren’t still out to kill him and his crew. Jack especially, if he still had his weapons, would have had an easy shot available to him, now that their precious barrier was gone, and he was hiding in the darkness of the woods. The rocks they were using for cover weren’t perfect. Maybe she could sneak around, find a pistol, and—and Jeremiah stabbed his hand, through the hair.

The world went dark.

~~Antoinette~~

Azamel vanished, fading from existence like a ghost might, becoming see-through for several moments, before ceasing to be.

“What the fuck,” Mark said. Antoinette blinked at the man, almost surprised that he was not mute. The skeleton creature flowing with insects and oozing annelids had a quiet, raspy voice, as one would expect from something that belonged in a pit of corpses. It was not a sound she appreciated, and she stepped away from the gross creature as it began to walk, or flow, toward the large, damaged wooden door ahead of them.

The similarities between Mark, a vile Begotten of rot, decay, and death, and Black Blood, a spirit that identified with her city, according to it, were not lost on her. Mere coincidence, she hoped.

Despite the urgency the situation demanded, Antoinette spared a moment to analyze her surroundings. Oh how Miss Vola would have squealed with delight, over the sights around Antoinette, of a castle hallway from an age long dead. The braziers along the walls were small gargoyles, almost identical to the creature before her, and were made of black metal that held a flame. The stones on the floor were smooth, and arranged in specific, symmetrical patterns, but worn and dusty with age and grime. The ceiling above, lumber and slightly warped, was in similar condition.

It reminded her of her castle, so long ago in Europe, if no one had cared for it. For a moment, she considered analyzing it, to determine the most likely age of its birth, and when perhaps it had last been renovated. But cruel reality required she respond to her immediate situation.

“Where did Azamel go?” her sheriff said.

Mark shook his ... its head. “I don’t know. I don’t know!”

The enormous gargoyle shook his head as well, and began to walk, then run for the door. “I feel them. Come.” That voice, a deep and powerful voice, sent a chill through her spine. She almost thanked the monster for the sensation. It had been ages since she had felt such a feeling, a mixture of fear and excitement, and of awe. She could literally feel the bass of the gargoyle’s voice through the stones of the floor and into her bare feet. There was a touch of rasp underneath the voice, layers that fit well into a nightmare, layers that added a hint of a snake-like hiss.

Her Beast struggled to understand the threat of the monsters before her. With other vampires, the Beast engaged in a play for dominance through an aura of monstrous destruction, competitive play for the alpha position, or lustful need. An unspoken back and forth always occurred when Kindred met each other, and the Beasts within knew how to examine the other, as wild animals did others of their own kind. When she had first met Uratha, it did not take long for her Beast to understand the aura the spirit wolves exuded. Begotten, on the other hand, were difficult to read, and now that she was literally within the nightmare realm, where Begotten merged with their Horrors, and became true creatures of terror and dream, that difficulty did not wane.

Mark clearly exuded something that felt weak, and yet deadly, dangerous, an assassin in the most ancient sense: rot, and the diseases that came with it. The enormous, and perhaps in a strange way, sovereign and handsome gargoyle, on the other hand, her Beast read as a blatant threat, a direct one. She did not know what abilities the strange creatures had, other than they could bestow nightmares in a similar way the Nosferatu could, and when in the physical realm, summon their Horror’s physical abilities to their person.

The one time Azamel had truly, without limit or restraint, summoned her Horror to her and attacked the environment around her, decades ago, it had destroyed a building. A large building, through sheer blunt force. Antoinette did not sense such raw strength from the gargoyle, but she did sense strength, and other forms of prowess. What abilities the four-winged, regal creature had, she could not tell, and she doubted her sheriff and his Auspex would be able to infer them, either.

She looked to Daniel, and he to her. Five seconds into this affair, and already things had not gone as planned. Azamel had predicted Jeremiah would attempt something tonight, some final effort to achieve his goal, and so far, her predictions had proven far too accurate. Was such foresight a question of Mark and Azamel having glimpsed into Jeremiah’s defenses, or did Azamel know the old hunter better than any of them could have imagined?

Antoinette followed after the running gargoyle, and after sharing a stern glance with her sheriff, Daniel followed as well. Sándor did not run like a lumbering beast. He, it, ran with the grace of a sprinting tiger, except he carried his weight on two feet of talons rather than four. Leaning forward, the beast’s tail slithered left and right behind him, matching its great strides as it poured power into its sprint. The inevitable comparison to a dinosaur ran through her mind, and she dismissed the juvenile simile quickly. The beast had wings, four of them, and his face looked mostly human, though with kingly, giant horns curling backward. Sándor looked more a demon than an artist’s unscientific portrayal of the ancient dinosaur.

When they reached the wooden door with a large hole carved into it, a work obviously done by claws, Sándor thrust out his hands, and the doors swung open for him. Antoinette had anticipated resistance from the door, but it parted to more than simply the gargoyle’s strength. It opened the way a door does when touched by its owner, with total familiarity and servitude. Beyond, Antoinette expected the enormous castle interior Jack had described to her, but she found something else entirely.

She stood upon a cliff edge, a narrow road that raised to a point. The point grew in width enough to hold, with impossible strength, a castle. She once had her own property on the face of a cliff, and she knew all too well the realities of an enormous structure of stone on the edge of a mountain. What she was looking at here, here in the nightmare, was not physically possible.

A lightning strike, distant and well behind the old castle, shook the nightmare whole with the following thunder. The flash of white against the cloudy night sky illuminated the castle, its glorious stone Gothic architecture, and a nigh endless drop that awaited beneath its precarious perch upon the cliff edge. The nightmare cared nothing for the reality and impossibility of such elevation. It cared only to terrify those within, and for all her strength and ability, Antoinette could not ignore the overpowering presentation of its aesthetic. Were she human, such a castle, at least a mile high, would have had her quivering.

So too, would the village that awaited her. She gazed out over the old, wooden buildings, the long winding road they surrounded, and the tall, twisted trees of black bark between them. Not unlike the castle behind her, the buildings weren’t set flat upon stone earth, but instead hung off the sides of the skinny cliff, and she could see the enormous roots of trees about them curling, twisting, and holding the buildings into the rock. A single earthquake would have left the village decimated, perhaps nonexistent, but it was a nightmare, and she had to start thinking in such terms.

Before the four of them could proceed down the road, and into the clearly haunted village, the sky was set aflame. Antoinette covered her eyes for a moment, lowered her hands, and gasped as she made sense of the insanity in the dark air above the woods ahead of them.

Over the distant forest, over the horrible trees and wicked branches, was Azamel, the enormous elephant creature, now in her full size and monstrous glory. Shackled to the sky, the monster trumpeted her agony and rage, and struggled against the amber, glowing symbols that bound her. But she could not move.

“In the forest,” the gargoyle said, and took off. The creature’s great weight tore into the ground, shredding rock and earth alike as he sprinted forward, spread his wings, and caught the air. With wings spread, Sándor looked far more enormous, his wings titanic and long enough to lift his colossal weight against the air currents beneath him.

Before she could pursue, the world went dark. Beyond dark. The world ceased to exist. She froze, and vitae pumped through her limbs like a flood as she prepared for an attack. None came. She listened for the sound of the wind, of the distant gunfire in the forest, of Sándor’s absurd wingspan, or of Azamel’s trumpets of pain. Nothing. As if the world had decided it simply no longer existed, and had blinked out of reality, all around her she found nothing. No wind touched her skin through her business suit, and no ground greeted her bare feet. The smell of rock, wood, and mountain air vanished. It had all faded away.

All except Azamel. The elephant above came closer, and closer, until Antoinette was not far from the hanging giant. Or, had Antoinette come closer to her? With nothing else in existence, literally, to form context, movement had no meaning. She may as well have been floating through space, though she could tell she was not, somehow.

“Daniel?” she said. No, she did not say it. She tried, and she was certain her mouth moved and lungs compressed to create the noise. And yet, no noise came. She was speaking into oblivion, and oblivion was all she could hear.

“Azamel,” the darkness said. “Azamel. I loved you.”

~~Jack~~

Jack reached down, picked up a rock, and grinned as he stepped out from the forest. He didn’t need his pistol, or any of his weapons, to kill these fuckers from a distance. A well thrown rock with Kindred strength behind it would kill just as well as a bullet.

This wasn’t how he wanted things to go. The hunters were supposed to be buried under his legion, and he’d torture them to death in a beautiful, gory display of dominance. He’d march toward them, unstoppable, a fucking Terminator, and he’d spend the whole night picking them off one by one. He’d break their legs, and drag them screaming to a room, where he’d gather them and bathe in their wails. He’d Kiss one or two of them to death, but the others wouldn’t get to die so quickly, or pleasurably. It’d be a great night of slaughter!

But noooo, Jeremiah had to be a fucking asshole, and sacrifice his pawns for some sort of gambit. Now there was fire everywhere, blocking him. Worse, the hunters were all dead! He’d get, at best, seven hunters to kill, and that was a pale comparison to the nigh two dozen he’d had not long ago. Even doubly worse, was how they’d ruined his groove. It was cool, beating up the gargoyle enforcer, but his night of unleashing unimaginable horrors on the hunters was wrecked. Now, he was in the fucking forest, ready to throw a rock, because they had fire and protection circles, and—

No. Fuck a rock. This was his follow up performance! His debut at the hospital was awesome, and he had to top that. Nothing less than a grand display of strength, complete with explosions and loud noises, would do.

He put the rock down, reached out for the base of a tree trunk, and reached into himself. Jack, old Jack, was such a weak Ventrue. He, on the other hand, was the mother fucking best. A drop of vitae was all he needed. For him, a single drop was enough to break minds. A single drop was enough to heal wounds. A single drop was enough to summon a wall of blood around his body. A single drop was enough to command legions of animals. And, and this was where old Jack sucked, a single drop was enough for him to unleash strength. Real strength. Kindred strength. Ventrue didn’t come to Kindred strength as easily as the Nos or the Daeva, but Susanna had spent the time to build it, develop it, master it, and the new Jack could feel Vigor as easily as Dominate, Animalism, and Resilience.

There was something about the power of raw strength, that fucking rocked.

Jack sank his fingers into the trunk of the tree, the one tree that stood between him and the hunters, and started to lift. He was going to crush them, all of them, right now. The barrier was mostly gone now, said the chirps of his two best agents, so there wasn’t anything stopping him from attacking the humans from a distance. A tree thousands of pounds heavy, thrown sideways, directly at the hunters? It’d be great. They’d shoot him, and he’d shrug off the bullets as he threw the tree. They’d get crushed, damaged, but probably live, and he’d walk up to them once the fire died, and have some fun.

Which would give first, the roots of tree and their grip on the ground, or the wood itself, snapping the trunk? He—

He let go of tree, and stared up at the sky. Amber fire scorched the black clouds, and he glared into the burning light, letting it sear his retinas for a single moment before his irises adjusted. Azamel, in the sky, bound to it, with Elen’s ritual symbols burning in the air around her.

Jack stepped out from behind the tree, and glared at Jeremiah. The fucker was doing something, yelling and babbling, and he had a knife in his hand. The fuck was he doing? The fuck was Azamel doing here? Christ, she was making a racket, trumpeting her strange Horror’s pain, and practically making the forest shake with its piercing, layered noise. What the fuck was—

Darkness. Everywhere, was darkness. The tree he was leaning against, gone. The feeling of its bark under his hands, gone. The feeling of ground under his shoes, gone. The sound of fire, the breeze on his naked chest, all gone. All that was left was him, standing in endless darkness, underneath Azamel’s hanging, enormous elephant body.

“Azamel,” someone said. “Azamel. I loved you.” Jeremiah’s voice.

Jack frowned, and swung his hand out for the tree he knew was beside him. Nothing. His hand moved through the air, unimpeded, not by tree or even air.

The elephant above remained where she was, and while he could see her, it, whatever, she wasn’t making any noise, despite her attempts to. The flapping, dangling, gigantic elephant trunk was obviously trumpeting, but not making a single sound anymore, when before the darkness came, she’d been driving a railroad spike into his brain.

Ok, so, what was happening?

“It took decades to learn this ritual, Azamel, to get the ingredients I needed. Elen, a shaman from the old world, before we Americans ran this land over, and killed everyone. A nightmare realm, to trap you, the whole you, the real you. People who trusted me with their lives, to be sacrificed.” The man’s voice broke, wavering, a hitch in his throat. “It’s a cursed ritual, Azamel, and it was my last option. I never wanted to do it, but my hand has been forced. If you’d just ... let me kill you, none of this would have had to happen.”