Chapter 124

~~Eric~~

Jack, Clara, and Sándor, had taken a very strange route. First, they’d left the mansion, and headed into North Side. Then their trail ended inside an old, abandoned hotel. Not a hotel, but some sort of motel? Hard to tell. According to Jessy, the city went through some gold rushes and job rushes during development at the beginning of the twentieth century, and a lot of people moved to the city for seasonal work, building the subway and whatnot. So some companies set up temporary housing.

Inside the building, it was obviously very old, and Eric recognized the look of its hallways and floor. It wasn’t far removed from the hallways in Sándor’s castle, especially with the lights off. Plus, it was abandoned, unkempt, dirty, and a bit damp, again, all like the hallways of his castle. If Begotten needed to enter their lairs from places that looked like their lairs, this would probably do.

Fiona and Athalia looked at each other, and then to the rest of them.

“Sándor opened a pathway here, like you’ve probably put together already,” Athalia said. “I can see where this path opened up, and can follow it. But, we’ll be breaking into his lair.”

“That’s bad?” Jessy said.

Athalia nodded. “Imagine someone breaking into your sleeping den, vampire. Whether you were asleep in it or not, it would piss you off, wouldn’t it? And I—”

“We don’t have a choice,” Damien said. “If Jack and Clara have not contacted their respective groups, then something’s wrong. And after everything that’s happened, I’m not taking chances.”

“So, you vampires take full responsibility?”

“Yeap,” Jessy said with a small hand wave. “Now pop her open.”

From there, the group of them entered Sándor’s lair. Damien, Fiona, Noah, and Athalia had seen it, and Eric and Jessy too, but for Caleb, it was brand new. Stepping out of darkness and into a castle’s hallway, lit only by strange gargoyle braziers, was enough to shock anyone, even veteran Uratha who’d done some insane shit in their lives.

Fiona followed them into the hall, and Caleb whistled as he looked her up and down. She was scary, sure, with giant black horns growing out of her bald head, along with horns growing out and curling back where her eyes should have been. But the horns on her head looked kinda beautiful, in a fancy crown kinda way, and the horns coming out of her eyes almost looked like a black veil. Her spider legs that stuck out from her back were smooth, enormous, and sharp. And, the spidersilk dress she wore was partly see-through, and showed off a huge rack and inhumanly tiny waist.

She was some dude’s ultimate monster girl kink. But, he was hardly one to judge. He was dating a girl with a monster guy kink.

If Fiona and him had actually tried a relationship, would monster guy have fucked monster girl? Strange thought. Stranger, because even thinking about him and Fiona didn’t make sense in his brain. He was with Jessy now, and she fit him like a glove. Fiona did not.

Before Damien had a chance to say anything to the staring werewolf, Caleb jumped back at the sight of Athalia. Athalia was fucking freaky as shit, and Eric stepped back as well. He knew what she looked like when transformed, but nothing could prepare him for the sight of her obsidian skeleton body, its skeleton wings, its size, or the fact it was missing everything below the spine.

“Holy shit,” Caleb whispered.

Fiona, or Vrall or whatever, chuckled, and Athalia hissed, and moved on.

They picked up the trail, and were soon standing on a narrow cliff path, a thousand miles up, castle behind them perched precariously on the cliff, and a village down the path onto the mountain. He didn’t need to ask, it was obvious. Haunted. The village was haunted.

As they walked past the old and decrepit houses, obviously built hundreds of years ago, eyes watched them from the windows. There wasn’t any light in the houses, and it was nighttime, but the eyes were still visible. Glowing, but not really glowing, they were simply visible, and disturbing.

“If Sándor had wanted to,” Athalia said, “he could have his Horror attack us, or his lair.”

“He’s in control of his Horror, while not here?” Jessy said.

“Not true control,” Vrall said, Scott accent completely gone, and replaced with something Eric guessed came from South America. “But, guide, yes.”

Athalia hissed at the spider woman. “Enough sharing of secrets. They only need to know that the Sándor has told his lair to leave us be, preemptively at that.”

“Sounds like an olive branch, sorta,” Caleb said.

From there, they entered the haunted forest, found a giant creepy tree, went into it, and entered another chamber of Sándor’s lair. A haunted hospital. He was surprised, but he shouldn’t have been. They were going through the chambers of a nightmare monster’s lair. They were going through nightmares so strong they left a permanent imprint on ... wherever it was dream monsters lived. Of course they’d run into a lot of haunted shit. Fake haunted, since it was nightmare stuff, not real ghosts, but since nightmares were apparently real, they didn’t seem so fake.

Thankfully there was a scent trail to follow, and they followed it along the hospital hall, until it stopped. Not the hall, the trail, it just stopped. They didn’t go through any door, but the hallway continued on, with no scent trail.

“Here,” Fiona said. “It’s ... it’s another one of the tears.”

Tears? Jessy and Eric looked at each other, shrugged, and looked to everyone else. Besides the two of them, everyone else looked very anxious about the mention of tears.

The skeleton creature gestured to the empty space. “If the trail ends here, then they went through the tear and into whatever realm it cut into.”

“Can you tell?” Damien asked.

“Not until I open it and see where it goes. It’s ... covered, in some kind of ... webbing?” She hissed louder, alien rasp grating on Eric’s brain.

Noah and Caleb both took a step back, and rumbled in their throats. For the life of him, Eric could not resist the reflex to do the same, and not because of Athalia. Something instinctual told him to be fucking wary of webbing in this context.

“Do it,” Noah said.

The monster nodded her giant skull, set her weight onto one huge hand of claws, pointed the other at the hallway, and ripped it to the side. Ripped, because despite it being nothing but open air, something gave her claws resistance. Snap, snap, a vibration struck Eric’s insides, inaudible, without touch, but it was there, echoing in his mind. It was like someone snapping guitar strings; stronger, like steel strings used on big bridges.

She swiped again, and again, and all three werewolves cringed as they felt whatever was happening. Fiona noticed, but didn’t seem disturbed. The vampires seemed completely unaware. It did look like Athalia was slashing at the air and nothing but, and the snapping web must have not existed in a way the vampires could sense it. They were creatures of blood, he supposed. This webbing shit was not.

The vampires stepped back when the air split apart, and a pathway revealed itself, lined in gold and marked with dots of white. Along its edges, white lightning streaked across, some of it moving like a snake through an endless ether of oblivion.

“The Gauntlet,” Noah said. “But I ... I don’t recognize the smell from the other side.”

After a moment’s silence, Caleb let out a quiet snarl and stepped closer to the hole floating in the air. “I hear something. Clicking sounds...”

While Noah and Caleb used their werewolf senses, spirit or otherwise, Eric came in closer, stood between them, and stared through the hole into the distance. It was dark in there, with some sort of gray fog blocking their vision, but through it, a green glow moved. Tiny, almost invisible, but something green drifted along, far in the distance. And another, and another. Almost like green fireflies, the strange green lights moved with uniform motion. If they’d been red, he’d have imagined an army of history, holding torches and marching through a swampland or something, with the fog to hide their approach.

“We going in?” Jessy said.

Noah nodded. “If the azlu is in there, wherever there is, we need to know. And we need to get Clara.”

“We need to find Jack,” Damien said.

“We need to find Sándor,” Athalia said.

Vrall nodded, crown of horns nodding with her. “Then I’ll go first.” She raised a hand — too few fingers on that hand of claws — before Damien could say anything. She gave him the hand, he took it, and then she walked toward toward the tear, her spider legs carrying her while her human-ish legs dangled an inch above the floor. A thick white rope connected her hand to Damien’s.

The man looked down at his hand, surprised, but he caught on quick, and reached out with his other hand for a door frame.

Everyone froze when Athalia took his hand in her grasp. Her hand was big enough to circle his whole damn body, making the sight of clutching his hand, er, arm, almost comical. Damien stared at her, eyes wide for a moment, obviously ready to defend himself if Athalia attacked; not that he could do much with each hand being pulled in opposite directions by a couple of dream monsters, but still.

Athalia snorted, angry, and with rough claws that had Damien’s eyes wide, the huge monster took the thread from Damien’s hand, and ripped it free. After wrapping it around her enormous right hand, she slammed her free hand into the hallway behind them. Her claws sank into the floor. Everyone nodded as they came to understand. Of course she’d make the better anchor than Damien. And, if shit went to hell, Athalia could yank them out with some serious brute strength.

Fiona chuckled, shrugged an apology to Damien, and crawled through the hole with her spider legs. The sharp points pressed against the air where the gold of the Gauntlet showed itself, and Fiona stepped along them. Noah and Caleb both let out tiny grumbles, and Eric forced a rising smirk off his face. They didn’t like the Begotten, and how they had the freedom to go wherever the fuck they wanted, be that Gurihal or the Hisil or whatever the old word was for the Dream world. But in a time like this, they needed them. Forced cooperation.

Honestly, Eric didn’t care if they didn’t like each other. He just wanted to chill in Dolareido, hang with his girlfriend, and defend his territory. If he had to piss a circle around the damn city so people could calm down, he’d do it.

Fiona disappeared through the circle for only a moment, and then appeared again a moment later. “The Gauntlet is very thin here. Those spiders have been repairing it. Come, it is a long way down.”

“Spiders?” Caleb said, coming over to the strange hole in the air. “Multiple?”

“Yes. Is that strange?”

“Very. Hosts devour each other, become strong, take over a human mind, and mutate into giant killing machines. Working together is pretty damn strange. Could be just a first step, before a strong one starts to eat the others?” he asked, looking over his shoulder to Noah.

“Science later, ya fucking nerds. Let’s go find our people now.” Jessy pushed past the wolves, grabbed onto the thick rope, and climbed through the tear.

Noah and Caleb glanced back at him, and he smiled and shrugged. No point in trying to change Jessy. Better to roll with her.

“Can your thread handle the weight?” Noah said.

“This many people? Only if Athalia does not need to suddenly pull us to safety.”

“She might,” Damien said. “Let’s do two groups. Fiona, Jessy and Noah go first. Then Eric, Caleb, and me.”

“And Athalia?” Noah said.

“Athalia can fly.”

After a few minutes, the thread wiggled like a whip a few times, and Athalia gestured for the rest of them. The thread didn’t inspire confidence, but silk was a damn strong material for its weight. Eric took it, looked up at the black skeleton monster holding the end, and sighed. If it took a few minutes for the others to reach the bottom, then a fall would kill them, or at least kill Eric and Caleb. All Athalia had to do was let go, and two werewolves would probably die. Scary thought.

Crawling through the hole felt strange. They weren’t actually going through Gauntlet the way Uratha typically did, by literally passing through it. This was more like one of those glass underwater tunnels in large aquarium parks; they were bypassing the water, not swimming through it. He was surrounded by air, not the strange material of the Gauntlet, and when he reached out to his sides, he touched the strange, undefinable essence of the barrier that separated humans from spirits.

How the fuck did something actually tear up the fucking Gauntlet? And why wasn’t anyone surprised? Anyone except him and Jessy.

The silk thread took him out into a grand abyss, and he sucked in a hard breath as he realized he couldn’t see the ground. Fog, so much fog. He lowered himself along the sticky thread as fast as he reasonably could, but there was no getting around that he was a pile of meat high enough in the air that a fall would break a lot of limbs, and potentially kill him; that was assuming Fiona was correct about the distance to the bottom, too.

As he went down, he stared out into the fog, and shivered as the thousands of green glowing dots moved along, slow, and creepy as all fuck. Something about them really screamed eerie horror vibes, and he found himself looking down and around for more of the green lights. If there were any underneath him, he would not like that. Very much not like that. But there weren’t. It was nothing but a smooth descent through fog, and eventually, onto rock.

Damien, last off the wire, gave it a few hard jerks, and looked around at the strange fog, the smooth, flowing rock base underneath them, the equally smooth, dark rock of the wall beside them, and the distant green, drifting lights. It was a gigantic cavern, the size of a fucking city.

“Spirits?” Damien said, pointing to the drifting green.

The three werewolves all shook their head.

“I don’t sense spirits,” Noah said. “I do smell ephemera, but ... not spirits.”

“What else smells like ephemera?” Fiona asked. It was Fiona again, the redhead, the girl he’d dated for like a day, jeans and brown leather jacket, no spider legs or horns anywhere. Which scared him shitless for a second. How the fuck were they going to get back out? But if the dream monsters didn’t seem worried, they could probably do something, even when not in their dream world.

Noah shrugged. “Not sure. But we’re not in the Hisil.”

He was right. Being in the Hisil was like the difference between being in the air or in water. Every nerve in the body would be telling you and warning you of the familiar, dangerous environment.

Everyone but Fiona jumped away when Athalia landed. Enormous skeleton wings, silhouettes of black shadow, jutted from her very human back, and disappeared seconds later as the woman got up from a foot and knee.

“Can you smell our companions?” she said. Her first steps into a new dimension and all she was concerned with was the mission. In any other circumstance he’d want to take things slow, but the atmosphere around them was oppressive, and cold. He wanted out.

“Yeah,” Caleb said, “and ... lots of blood. This way.”

~~Damien~~

It took them several hours to piece together what happened. There’d been a chase and fight with the azlu, and judging from the blood they found, it’d been a fully formed azlu host. Damien could still remember the feel of it stabbing him through his guts, and leaving behind a rather massive hole.

Jack and company had apparently chased the azlu off, and the three of them had come back to the tear. Then, they’d left again, probably after realizing they couldn’t get out. Fiona and Athalia insisted that was strange, since Sándor was with them; he could fly, tear open a hole through the tear if it was repaired, or make a new pathway. But the Uratha insisted he’d lost a lot of blood, from the smell of it.

Damien and the crew followed the trail, through the gloom and fog of their new environment, and as the uncomfortable silence of the strange place settled upon them, they all grew quiet to match. The werewolves became wolves, as did Jessy, and the sounds of their feet disappeared. Fiona and Athalia, both monsters of darkness, found it easy enough to be quiet, and Damien risked a peek at them with Auspex to see what they were doing. The two monsters were pulling something from within, something his eyes didn’t recognize, that coated them in invisible blackness. A Horror’s version of the vampire’s Cloak of Night, he supposed.

Damien did his best to wrap them in his Cloak, but the environment did not seem to accept his efforts well. It took more vitae than usual to encompass them, as if the fog around them was a heavy blanket they had to drag with them. But, with some concentration, he was confident his efforts to mask at least their most obvious sounds worked, along with helping them blend into the fog a bit better.

After a couple hours of careful but expedient prowling through the fog, with the three werewolves in front leading them, noses to the ground, they stopped. Four wolves sat up, pointed their ears forward, and listened. Message understood: noises up ahead. They resumed their prowling, slower, quieter, and as they pushed ahead, the sound of banging metal became clear.

Damien squinted as the fog thinned. Lampposts? They came closer, and everyone looked confused as it became clear that yes, those weak, flickering lights overhead were old lampposts. Then, train tracks, and dirt. Closer, they found actual train carriages and cargo crates. Closer, they found knocked over towers of metal, some large hammers and metal spikes scattered around, and a distant warehouse, rusted and broken. And with every minute they grew closer, the sound of metal banging against metal grew louder, as did the alien clicks and shrieks of an azlu, and the roars of a man.

“Fuck you!” a voice yelled out in the dark. Banging metal followed, loud, heavy, and with more than enough impact for Damien to feel it. Closer, it only got worse, with more metal crashing against other metal, and vibrations so powerful they had Damien’s brain rattling in his skull. It was like an intermittent earthquake that came in pulses spurred by the violence of monsters.

He knew that voice.

“Hide!” another voice whispered. They all whipped their heads toward the sound, and everyone froze as the met the empty eyes of a ghost. For a moment, Damien thought it was Mary, but a second to look at her showed it was another woman, another translucent creature that leaked mist. She was underneath a train, hiding where its wheels sat on the tracks.

While everyone stared at her, Damien crouched low and crept over to her.

The hunt for Jack and the others had taken them through two nightmare chambers, through a tear, and into a world of darkness and mist. Of course there’d be ghosts. He’d seen caverns like this in many paintings, those that tried to capture the misery and sadness of an Underworld roaming with the dead. There weren’t any train yards in those paintings, but still, it didn’t take a genius to put it together when they found an eyeless, see-through woman.

“Who are you?”

“Sabrina!”

The name poked at a memory, but he last it pass.

“Have you seen our friends? They—”

“Yes, yes I have! They’re around here somewhere. Couldn’t have gotten far.”

A little voice in his head warned him this could be a trap. Who knew what sort of horrible things a ghost lurking under a train, in some sort of Underworld, might say or do to them?

“Do you know their names? I—”

“Clara, and Sándor.” She nodded, empty eyes wide as if in a panic. “Jack’s fighting the spider monster. The other two are hiding and sneaking away.”

Clara and Sándor sneaking away? It was true then, they were injured, as the Uratha said they were. Damien pointed at the four wolves, pointed to his nose, and gestured out to the rest of the train yard. Then he pointed at himself, and to the noise. Noah and Caleb nodded without so much as a moment’s hesitation, and the two wolves headed off together. Eric and Jessy took a moment to figure it out, but once they did, they took off in their own direction together.

Look for Clara and Sándor, look for an opportunity to engage, and fight. And Damien was going in first. They all knew who was fighting the azlu, and they weren’t going to leave him to do it alone.

Maybe they should have. Damien had seen first hand what the curse could do, twice. He wasn’t anxious for a third time.

Damien withdrew his sword, and reached into his coat for his pistol. And put it back. A pistol wasn’t going to do anything against an azlu, and the sheriff had made it clear how much better a sword was to a Kindred in most circumstances. Time for a little payback for the gut stab?

He gripped the hilt with both hands, and looked behind him at Fiona and Athalia.

“Fiona, can you be ready to ensnare the monster?”

“Aye!” she whispered, and even the whisper sounded enthusiastic. He loved her joviality, and he prayed to God it didn’t get her killed.

“And, if this one breaks apart into small spiders when it dies—”

“Ah will catch them, too!”

“Athalia, can you provide support?”

She frowned at him, a mix of hate and surprise in her eyes. “You trust me to help you?”

“I trust you to help because Sándor is out here somewhere, and if he dies, your mission is lost.”

She grit her teeth loud enough he heard it, but after a few seconds consideration, nodded. “I will attack from the shadows when you create an opening.”

Nodding, he turned toward the ghost still hiding under the train. “You, uh...”

“It hurt me already! I’m not fighting it again.”

Well, he could understand that. Not like most people would survive being hurt by this monster. Then again, she was a ghost. The monster could hurt ghosts? It was something from the Uratha side of the paranormal, so that sorta made sense. Spirits, ghosts, different but the same?

“Alright, we’ll take care of it. Thank you for the information.”

The ghost raised an eyebrow at him like he was crazy, but he paid her no mind. Behind the train she hid under, beyond a pile of metal, rust, bent steel, and thousands of scattered bricks, Jack was fighting the azlu. Even now, the boy screamed and roared; his young voice didn’t match the psychotic rage in it, or the violence he was capable of. But, when Damien jumped onto the train cart, and looked out over the train graveyard, he knew it was Jack.

Not Jack. It was the curse.

Jack and the enormous spider creature circled each other, and where Damien was sure there’d once been cargo crates, train carriages, towers, fences, steel beams, and lampposts, was only destruction. Piles of debris circled the two monsters, much of it broken and dented, with shredded remains under their feet. As if a bomb of chaos had exploded, the two fought in a crater of mayhem, and Damien gulped as he scanned the battleground.

Jack’s suit was mostly gone, except for some tattered pants and his shoes. No jacket, no shirt, no vest holster. A couple glints buried in the insanity lying about suggested where the boy’s weapons might be, probably used and either empty or damaged, or useless. The azlu that nearly killed Damien had been extremely resilient to anything but the most extreme damage, and fire. No one had fire, which all the vampires were surely thankful for, but it was the tool the werewolves had used last time to make sure the other azlu died and died completely. Jack had killed the second one with a giant metal rebar, straight down through the skull and into its body, only for it to supposedly break into a bunch of small spiders and escape.

This time, they’d be ready for it.

Blood coated Jack’s skin, dark blood, darker than human. It swirled, coursing up and down his body, and tiny whips of the heavy liquid cracked the air as it did. The boy’s eyes were gone, or maybe hidden, but all Damien could see in his eye sockets was more vampire blood, swirling, leaking but never leaving his body. Gashes and holes decorated his skin and muscles, some small, some large, and blood flowed from them, as if veins had become external. The monster must have punctured him with its scythe arms, breaking through the barrier Jack’s curse protected him with. What damage the spider managed to accomplish wasn’t enough to stop him though. The curse could probably be left with nothing more than a skeleton, and still survive. Immortal, as long as the curse protected him with its unending tides of damned blood.

Immortal, but thoroughly damaged. The spider must have hit him thirty or forty times, and the only thing keeping Jack from literally collapsing into a pile of shredded limbs, was the blood surging through him. The azlu wasn’t doing much better. Several of its spider legs were missing, and it struggled to get its huge body off the dirt and rock beneath it. More obvious, was that it was missing one of its arms. Those arms were massive, each ending in a giant bone scythe, and more than capable of splitting a car in half. Jack had managed to rip one off?

No, not rip. Not even he was that strong, to de-arm a creature of such insane strength. However, beside the spider’s removed arm, coils of barbed wire sat, ripped free of one of the metal and wood fences nearby. It was coated in flesh and blood, and broken into two long pieces.

Jack must have sawed through its arm with the barbed wire.

The curse was pushing his Ventrue blood far further than it should have been able to reach, when it came to strength. When Damien had described Jack’s assault on Sándor’s Horror, Maria had been quiet and contemplative, but he’d managed to detect a hint of fear on her. According to Maria, only ancient elders with many centuries to their name could push their bodies so deep into Disciplines that did not come naturally to them. For a Ventrue to be fighting a giant gargoyle in a melee brawl was an extremely impressive feat, something Maria doubted Viktor would be capable of.

“Come on, bring it!” Jack yelled, and he kicked a rock at the spider. It bounced off harmlessly. “Fucking animal, weak, pathetic, mindless. Come on!” The boy circled the huge creature, but his feet were heavy, and he nearly tripped several times as he failed to lift his shoes higher than the debris. He didn’t fall, but it wouldn’t be long before he did.

Damien managed to get a peek at his friend’s palms. They were shredded.

The alien creature charged. Like Jack, it stumbled, five spider legs struggling to manage its weight, but only thirty feet separated the two combatants, not far enough to be a serious hindrance to the enormous monster.

“Fuck you! Fucking die!” Jack couldn’t get out of the way in time, but the spider’s charge was a mess. Its attempts to hit him with its scythe arm failed, and it fell forward. It bowled over Jack, crashed into him, and fell onto its stomach at the same time, with Jack literally underneath it.

Jack screamed and roared fury, spat venom, and swung his fists into where the human and spider melded at the chest and waist. The spider shrieked in pain and pushed off the ground in an attempt to try again, but Jack dove at one of the spider’s legs. Like some sort of crazed, hungry animal, Jack got his bloody hands on one of the legs, and bit into it. The monster’s shrieks rose an octave, and Damien winced as its inhuman cry deafened him, and as the monster’s blood gushed out onto the ground. Jack’s bite had been vicious, and had ripped a giant chunk of the relatively thin spider leg out. A moment later, Jack ripped the leg in half, and the monster screamed its agony.

Behind him, Fiona and Athalia got into position, Fiona close, Athalia between his train cart and a nearby cargo crate. He couldn’t see Athalia’s face, but Fiona stared at the mayhem like watching a horror movie. It was not a pretty sight. Damien forced himself to look back to his friend, at his torn and ravaged body, at the dark blood flowing up and down his flesh and through it like it was alive, and he grit his teeth.

First, the azlu, then they could deal with Jack.

He looked around for signs of the others. One wolf sat upon a leaning tower of metal bars, and from his posture, Damien knew the other wolves were hidden in the darkness and mist. Hopefully they were waiting for a signal.

“Fiona, be ready to catch any spiders that escape.”

“Aye.”

He nodded, tightened his grip on his sword, and poured every ounce of vitae he had into his Cloak, and speed. It was like that time he’d landed his sword on the Prince, and had cut off one of her legs, and one of her arms. Even a mighty beast could be felled by a single swing of the sword, if it could be done undetected. And the spider was very distracted. He just had to be careful to not get hit by that scythe arm on the entry.

The monster raised his arm, ready to strike at Jack again. At this point, Damien doubted the strike would kill Jack. Hell, Jack was likely to win this fight if it continued, but the more the kid drained his blood, the more problematic dealing with him might be. It was as good an opening as any.