Chapter 48

~~Eric~~

Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck.

He clutched the small woman against his body, tight enough so he could keep running, but there was no hiding that she was bleeding on him. Her blood was soaking through his suit and onto his skin. Each labored breath he took filled his lungs with the smell of it; and the smell was so damn famliar. Blood, life, from this dying creature in his arms.

He shook his head. What the fuck, get a grip.

“Just ... find me a place ... really ... really dark. Completely ... dark.”

“You have a bullet in your fucking stomach, Fiona!” He winced as another bullet snapped nearby, crashing into his shadow as he rounded another corner. Those psychos were a ways behind him, slowed down by that weird web thing the girl had made, but they were going to catch up.

“Darkness ... all ... I’ll need...”

“Darkness? Like, a shadow.”

“Darker ... complete ... darkness.”

“You need a hospital you fuck—”

“Darkness!” She grabbed his suit jacket, and managed to shake it a couple times as she raised her eyes to glare at him. Christ she was pale.

“Alright, alright! Fucking darkness, alright.” He looked around as he ran. Easier to ignore the grinding pain in his knee this way at least, panicking about the bleeding-to-death girl in his arms and trying to find some place where he could get the sort of darkness she was looking for.

It was night time, and he was on the edge of North Side and South Side. Only a mile from the neighborhoods, and he could run that. It’d destroy his knee, but he could run it. The girl was insistent though, very insistent on the darkness crap, and after seeing her defeat four psychos using some very weird shit, he really should just do what the girl said. If girl was even the right word to describe her.

Was she a monster? Or a regular every day Spider-Man? Far as Eric knew, Spider-Man didn’t stab people with giant black blades. And that was a comic-book character. This girl had done insane fucking shit right in front of him, summoned something large, with eight legs that doubled as blades, and she’d attacked with them. Shadows that vanished after she used them.

She’d told him to not say anything, as if this was something she’d anticipated. God damn it, the fuck sort of ridiculous shit did he get caught up in?

Her blood was dripping down into his clothes. The feel of its warmth on one of his legs cracked across his brain like a whip. Find darkness, get to some fucking darkness.

A nearby building, some old, decrepit multi-floor building that was abandoned, waiting to be renovated and fixed. The door wasn’t locked; most of the super old shit wasn’t, worthless as the property was. He leaned down to open it, one arm hooked behind Fiona’s shoulders, the other under her legs. With a little maneuvering, the two of them slipped into the darkness of the old building that was bound to fall on their heads at any moment.

He was panting, gasping, and every word stung his lungs. “You’d think ... with how much money is rolling around South Side ... they’d have enough money to fix ... all these abandoned buildings ... North Side.”

“Old ... town.” She was gasping too, coughing, choking, but no blood came out of her mouth. Not lung shot, but the bullet had definitely ruined her side, her waist, and he was afraid to look down and see. She could start vomiting blood any minute. Just keep moving, keep moving.

No wonder the place was abandoned. The brick walls were filled with half-broken slabs, bits of ceiling had fallen apart and rained wood chunks over the equally destroyed floor, and old lighting fixtures hung empty. So dark, so very dark, dark enough he had to squint to see the silhouettes of the walls, and that was with his better eyes.

“D ... Darker.”

“Darker, right, darker. You know you’re going to bleed to death? And I’m going to go to prison for it. You think a black guy won’t get pinned with first degree murder, getting caught with a dead white girl in his arms?”

She laughed, then let out a quiet, low whine as the pain ravaged her, left her shivering and curling up against him. Don’t make jokes, bad time for jokes.

The building looked like it must have been used as a private office building, probably for lawyers or accountants or something, with a secretary behind the large desk he found in what looked like something between a living room and a lobby. Falling apart benches lined the walls to his left and right. The drapes were rotting, and horrible.

“B-Basement ... hurry ... I have to see her.”

See her? Basement? Cold started to work up his toes and into his legs, until his heart sped up for more reasons than adrenaline. He gulped as he looked down at the bleeding woman, the bleeding monster in his arms, and winced as he noticed her getting paler again. She was already pale, redhead and freckles and all, but his eyes could make out the white showing through as the blood drained out of her.

Second time he’d ever met this girl, and she was going to bleed to death in his arms. Fuck. Fuck fuck fuck.

Breathe, just breathe. Remember the shit in your dreams. Breathe.

He started wandering around, feet tripping over random bits of rubble. No time no time, go faster, find something. There were hallways lined with doors, and he peeked into them as he went past them as fast he could, but a basement wouldn’t be connected by a door in the hallway. Think. End of the hallway? No, a lot of these old buildings put a basement door near the bathroom.

Bingo. He pulled the door open, and gulped again.

Blackness.

When he was a kid, he’d visit his uncle and aunt’s place. A nice home, pretty big, fancy, old. It had a basement, deep and large, with stonework straight out of the medieval ages, exposed pipes and wall studs that still hadn’t been covered in drywall. It was a great place to goof around with sticks or a soccer ball, but the light switch was on the wrong end of the large room, far away from the staircase that lead back upstairs. Come nightfall, turning off the light meant navigating the large basement in pitch black to reach the stairs.

He was always sure, each night that it had happened, that a monster was going to get him. It never happened, but he could still remember how fast it got his heart beating, navigating the blackness to find the old wooden stairs. Stairs just like the ones he was looking at. Blackness, just like the blackness in front of him.

“Ok, yeap, I’m going to die. We’re both going to die, in a black abyss in an old building.”

“Please ... hurry...”

Gritting his teeth until it hurt, he started to walk down the stairs. His eyes were better now, so much better, and they couldn’t see shit. It was just blackness ahead, complete black, and with his hands underneath Fiona’s body, he couldn’t feel what was ahead of him either. Couldn’t reach out to brace the wall beside him, at least, until he turned his body a touch so he could nudge his shoulder and Fiona’s feet against it. A wall meant something, and something was far better than empty black, than endless nothing.

He’d probably make a horrible astronaut. Floating out there in the black, in the endless nothing? He shivered, and stared ahead into what might as well have been the same empty, colossal space before him. Breathe, just breathe.

Each step slow, each step painful as his knee fought against him, each step like walking into an obsidian chasm. He did his best, poking out with his foot and looking for the step below, and each time he managed to find it, covered in dust or bits of broken wood. If he stepped on a large bit of broken anything, good chance he’d trip, and tripping right now was a bad idea. Slowly, he took each step, and stabilized on each step before he took the next.

He almost tripped when he ran out of steps.

“We’re uh ... at the bottom. I can’t see shit.” He glanced back up to the stairway. Just a glimmer of a glow from the doorway above and behind them was the only light source, and it wasn’t reaching down where they were, in the pit of death.

“Put ... me down, and take ... my hand.”

“Girl, you’re bleeding out, and—”

“Just ... do it.”

God this girl. Not long ago the best he thought of her was that she was a fun, bubbly glass of champagne. Now, the girl had grit, serious grit, the sort of grit that made you keep fighting even when your knee was destroyed, the sort of grit that usually backfired and got you killed. Reality wasn’t a fucking movie, you didn’t get to succeed just because you were determined.

But at this point, she was going to die either way. She felt cold, and she wouldn’t stop shivering. Her voice wavered and cracked. She felt lighter.

He set her down, and kept one hand underneath her armpit, the other holding her free hand while she cradled her wound. He thought. He couldn’t see to be sure.

“Just ... follow me ... and ... d-dinnae freak out.”

“I’m beyond freaking out. You’re shot, you’re bleeding out, and instead of running to a hospital, we’re in the basement of an abandoned building. I ... I saw you do things, Fiona.”

“Aye. Ye’ll ... get to see more ... in a moment.”

Wonderful. Fucking wonderful.

He supported the girl as best he could. She managed a step, and then another, and her clothes shifted as she moved her hands in ways he couldn’t see. He could hear the drip of blood against the concrete beneath them, and each made his muscle tense and heart ache. Girl was going to die, and—

Something wet soaked through his shoes, his nice shoes too. He almost laughed at the concern, and raised the shoe to try and look at it. No good, still pitch black, and whatever the liquid was, it couldn’t have been blood, unless Fiona had suddenly turned into a pool of blood ahead of him. Nope, girl was still holding onto his hand, his holding hers and the other under her shoulder. But, each step soaked his shoes, and each step sank his shoes into something soft. Soft but kind of hard though, like wet mud over earth.

He tripped. Fuck, fucking fuck. So careful, every step had been so careful, but whatever he was walking in didn’t give a shit, and gripped on a shoe hard enough that it forced the step to follow shallow. Toe collided against something solid, and he spiraled with it, flopping forward and landing hard on his hands, both of them. Something wet and soft covered his suit head to toe, and soaked into it until he felt it on the skin.

Shit, Fiona! He turned to face where she’d be falling, and waited for the sound of her crashing into the wet crap beside him. But she didn’t.

“ ... this is home...” She smiled at him. Smiled. He could finally see, just enough lighting, just enough of a shade for him to catch her silhouette, and then the most basic features.

She didn’t look like Fiona. She didn’t sound like Fiona. Accent gone, replaced, changed, and her body rising higher, and higher, before in a gentle sway, it melded into the bending shadows of the leaves and vines around him.

Leaves? Vines? He jumped up, and groaned as bone ground on bone in his knee. He fell over again, but this time managed to catch himself against a tree. Tree. A fucking tree. What?

Breathe, just breathe. And with every breath, his eyes opened wider, adjusted to the glimmer of light that was hitting him and the mud around him through the canopy above, and exposed more of the impossible. A forest. A jungle. The heat was immense, and it wasn’t long before beads of sweat started to drip from his body. The smell was intense, of plant life, of animals, of rot and shit and fungus.

Breathing wasn’t so easy anymore. He forced it, made each breath happen, but each was flooding him with a billion smells, and he almost started to panic. He’d never had a panic attack before, but he could feel it coming, feel his muscles lock and started to shake, feel his lungs refuse to listen. He forced them to listen. Fucking breathe.

He gripped the tree beside him, felt the moistness of its bark, and whatever was growing on that bark. He felt his shoes push and shift against mud, and grass, and rocks and roots, and mulch. He felt the oppressive heat and humidity push through his suit. He felt eyes on him, everywhere, beady little eyes watching from branches and hanging vines from high above.

“ ... I’m in a fucking jungle.”

“You are.”

Her voice, not the same voice anymore, but someone else’s. Or was it even the same girl? Someone in her spot had sort of just, lifted off of the ground, and vanished into the trees and darkness around him. Maybe something had dropped down from above, grabbed her, and yanked her away?

“Where’s Fiona?”

“I am Fiona ... I am Vrallar’trakla of the Eight Blade Arach.” A raspy voice, powerful. Frightening.

“Those are two different names.” And one of them was a very weird name with a weird title attached to it.

“That is ... how it is for me, us. Not for most others of my kind, but for some, for me.” The invisible voice moved with rustling leaves, drifted above him, over and around him, like the shadows were whispering to him.

“ ... where are we?”

She laughed, a deep and powerful sound. Nothing like Fiona’s laugh.

“You remind me of Damien.”

“ ... what?”

“A vampire that stumbled into my home. Do not worry about him.” The voice sighed what sounded like relief, and pushed aside some of the canopy.

Only then could Eric see everything clearly, and he wasn’t so sure he wanted to. His eyes locked onto the two moons, one large, soft red, the other smaller but glowing a strong white. Not strong enough to provide much light beneath the canopy of what was apparently a jungle, but strong nonetheless.

But with the canopy pushed aside, he could finally see Fiona, or Vrallawhatchamacallit. And his jaw dropped as he stared at the exposed monster.

A humanoid shape floated many feet above the ground, and eight gargantuan spider-like legs came out of her back, long, slim, blade-like, with four of them stabbed into the earth while four others were touched and balancing against nearby trees and branches. The girl held by the legs looked absolutely nothing like Fiona, at all, not even close. Dark steel-colored skin, and instead of feet, her legs came to end in points, like her spider legs, like stiletto shoes without the shoe part, only the stiletto. Her hands were similar, with only two fingers and a thumb each, and those two fingers were long black blades like the rest of her limbs.

She was wearing a white dress, of what looked like the same spider silk material he’d seen her use a few times already. It dangled off of her, loose, pretty revealing too, and as much as he was looking at some sort of monster creature straight out of a nightmare, she had curves. Nice curves. Inhumanely nice, in fact, as he noticed her waist was too small for all her organs to fit, or a human’s organs anyway. But, a tiny waist paled in comparison to her other inhuman features. Especially the crown of horns.

She had a mouth and nose like a human, except for the dark, steel color. But she had no eyes. Black spikes curved outward from where eyes should have been, and joined many other spikes of similar shape that jutted outward from her skull, coiling backward and creating a sort of crown shape. Like some sort of beautiful, ancient creature, with a myriad of spikes flowing backward over her skull, instead of hair.

Beautiful, in a strange please-don’t-kill-me sort of way.

She smiled down at him from above. Her new mouth was smaller than her old one, subtle black lips offering him a warm smile.

“You’re ... you’re um ... I uh ... dreaming, yeah I’m dreaming.” He pinched his skin on the back of his hand. Still in the jungle. He slapped himself hard enough to spark a fresh headache. Still in the jungle.

“I have invited you into this little pocket of nightmares, Eric. I ... would have preferred to do this more gently. Or perhaps after Avery had spoken to you of your condition. None of this is as I had hoped.” The spider creature lowered herself down to him, but she never quite touched the ground. Always her legs dangled underneath her a few inches over the mud, with her sharp, pointed blade feet grazing against grass.

“Ok, not dreaming. I’m not dreaming, and you’re a spider monster, and I’m in a jungle. Where ... where’s the city? What the fuck is going on?”

“ ... perhaps not so much like Damien. But then a vampire would have an easier time accepting this than you.”

“Vampires!?”

She chuckled. God, she sounded nothing like she did before. The weird rasp to her voice, its power and size despite her normal-sized humanoid body, it was hard to accept that this was Fiona. But it was Fiona.

“W-Wait, you’re not bleeding?”

“No. Vrall has healed my wound, but at a cost. I hunger.”

Yeap, that sounded straight out of a nightmare. He backed up again, but a tree was behind him, and he wasn’t about to dart into the dark jungle blind, with nowhere to go. Christ, he was in a fucking jungle! Where the fuck was the city, the abandoned building, the distant honking of car horns and the smell of asphalt and gasoline. Fuck, it was all gone, all replaced. Now there was nothing but jungle.

Breathe.

“Ok, um, my shit can wait. For now, can you explain to me where the fuck I am, and ... and ... what the fuck you are?”

She sighed, nodded, and reached out a hand for him. If she’d had a blue and red pill in that hand, he’d have taken the blue and just closed his eyes. But he was neck deep in this shit whether he wanted to be or not, so, he took her hand, and waited. Her skin was oddly soft despite its dark steel color, and despite how the two fingers and thumb looked like black blades more than anything.

“At least I know you better than Damien, the first time this happened. That man hunted me into my lair, and I thought for sure he was out to kill me.”

“Damien ... and—” He gasped and clenched his jaw as Fiona, or Vrall, started to pull him up, and up. Her other hand reached out to hook under his shoulder, and she steadied him as she took him higher. Strong, damn strong. Her massive spider legs had no issue carrying the two of them, and within moments she’d lifted them fifteen feet into the air, and set them both onto a large branch. Up in the canopy instead of underneath it, it was easier to stare out through the levels of vines, leaves, and branches to see how the white and red moons bathed the jungle in their light.

A small part of him thought this could be romantic. A much bigger part was flipping the fuck out. Fiona had set him near the trunk of the tree though, and he braced against it with one arm as he looked down into the darkness beneath him, and then out over the rolling land of jungle.

“My phone. I need to contact Natasha, and tell her of these four, that they were indeed hunters and are now chasing me. They may know where the boy Jack is.” She frowned, though without eyebrows, or eyes for that matter, it was hard to tell. Only the subtle scrunch of her small nose gave it away.

God, she sounded nothing like Fiona, not even in dialect, and he couldn’t place the foreign accent either. Brazil maybe?

“Like I said, uh, Fiona, your phone’s destroyed.”

“Damn it.” She sank some of her claws into one of the branches passing overhead, and Eric pulled his head back as it snapped like a twig in her sharp grip. “We made a mistake, a bad mistake, Eric. Now they know about me, and you, and ... I’m sorry, for dragging you into this. I thought we’d get to see what they were up to, and not get spotted.”

“I guess we underestimated them.” He said it with raised eyebrow and eyes darting around, both at the jungle around him, and the monster girl in front of him. Still had a million reflexes telling him this couldn’t be happening, but with the hallucinations he’d already started suffering—”Wait, am I hallucinating this?”

She turned to face him, blade legs hovering a single inch above the branch where her feet should have been. “Of course not.”

“You say that, but here I am, regular Joe, in some sort of nightmare jungle with a half naked spider lady.”

“ ... I imagine in your hallucinations, there is only the one moon ... and ... perhaps she speaks to you?”

“How do you know that?” He reached out for her, grabbed her bare arms, and shook her. The crown of enormous horns that coiled back from her forehead and eye sockets shined in the strange moonlight. All her skin did. She really was soft. “How ... I ... I don’t...”

“ ... perhaps, as you said, we should focus on our present circumstances? I can explain about you, later, but for now, you should understand that you are in my lair. Please, tread lightly. I am ... there is ... you are in a dream, Eric, but you are not dreaming.”

He frowned. This was turning into some ridiculous Disney movie spiel, about how he’d stumbled onto something magical, and his life would forever be changed after this moment. Yeah, changed, because now people were shooting at him, and he was going to go home with fucking malaria.

“A dream?”

“A pocket of dream. A nightmare. A ... very old nightmare, where ... Vrall nested.” She gestured to herself, her body. “I told you about my nightmares. I guess I was just ... trying to bond with someone who was going through their own changes, not so long after I went through mine only a year ago.”

“And—”

“And you are not a Begotten. But changes are upon you, and ... ugh, this is a mistake. This is all a big mistake. I should not have involved you, I should have let you be, and later when you came into your own, maybe then...”

“Yeah, well, too late for that.” He sounded angry. He was angry. Christ, he was always fucking angry, and whatever was happening to him was adding some straight up hunger and aggression to go with it. Breathe. “I really am a fucked up person to help you with ... whatever it is you’re doing, you know. Did you not piece together the train wreck that is my life?”

She tilted her head to the side. Without eyebrows, he guessed it was the best way she had to express surprise, or interest, or something.

“That is a part of the reason I was delighted to see a change was upon you. You seemed so ... normal, compared to my vampire friends.”

“And vampires, vampires are a thing?” Again, his hands went up, and again he braced against the tree in case sneaky gravity decided to break his neck.

“Yes. But we can talk of them later. For now, just understand that you are in my lair, my home, a nightmare. I am a creature of the nightmare, and you are within that nightmare. Please stay close, or the nightmare may attack you.”

Ugh, this was some fucking Amazon jungle nightmare shit right here.

“Ok, I’m just going to turn off the smart part of my brain, and just go stupid kid mode here. I’m in a dream world, a nightmare, got it. You’re a nightmare creature, some magical, terrifying, creature. Got it.” He almost said busty, cause the little silk dress thing she was wearing was barely more than a sash, and it didn’t do a good job of covering up her exaggerated proportions. Made sense, he supposed, if she was a dream creature thing. Combining sexy with terrifying was a staple of nightmares, and slasher movies. “And those dudes chasing us?”

“Hunters. Killers of vampires and other creatures. Perhaps of Begotten as well. I wanted to follow them because it is possible they know where Jack is. A friend who has disappeared. A vampire.”

“O ... k. Friend, vampire, vanished, think he might be alive. So we were going to tail these four and now everything is fucked.”

“Yes. I—” Her body went rigid, her lowered head raised to stare straight, and then snapped around to look down and behind her.

Light beneath them, flickering as it passed leaves and vines, white light, the sort of light you got from LED.

“They’re here.”

“They followed us?

“ ... they must have followed my trail of blood into the building and its basement.”

“You didn’t, I don’t know, close the crazy fucking magical gateway behind you?” Getting snippy wasn’t going to help, but then, this was why he normally just kept his fucking mouth shut, because he turned into a snippy asshole bastard when he started mouthing off.

“It takes a moment to close, and ... and the gateway is large, it filled all the darkness of the basement. They must have been right behind us. It is closed now, but ... too late.”

Bad to worse, always bad to worse. Why the fuck did things always go from bad to worse?

~~Jack~~

The pain went from bad, to worse. He was never going to get used to pain.

Part of him thought he might. Memories of what Viktor did to him weren’t old enough to be forgotten. Memories of Damien stabbing him through his stomach were definitely not old enough to be forgotten. He still winced when he remembered Julias’s lesson about how much fire hurt Kindred, and how the older a Kindred was, the more damaging fire and sunlight could be.

It all sort of amalgamated into a searing poker of experience that stabbed through his brain, along with the sword stabbing through his leg.

His screams continued for ten seconds, until at last the agony became manageable, enough so he could stop screaming at least. He stared at the hand holding the large knife, the knife itself, and where it penetrated through his suit pants, his flesh, and through the bone of his leg. Never, ever, had a pain hit him with such vivid clarity, as a knife jammed through his bone. Viktor cutting his face and chest in half an inch deep had been overwhelming, almost surreal. This was all easily defined, radiating from a specific point, and making the muscles in the leg flex in some sort of futile attempt to expunge the blade. Each flex forced groans from Jack, each blinding him with flashes of white pain, until he started to go limp.

He grit his teeth, started breathing through them, and forced his eyes to look up at the psychopath.

“Stop...”

Jeremiah twisted the knife.

All at once the pain renewed, bones bending, flesh scraping along the side of the blade, bone too, until he felt something snap. Pain worked up and down his body in waves, each hitting his skull and forcing his stomach to squeeze on itself. Trying to make him vomit. Kindred wouldn’t vomit, not like this, but he could still feel his body trying to make it happen.

“Azamel’s nightmares spread, vamp. She grows hungry. You don’t even know what I’m talking about and you still defend her?” He almost snarled, but opted for twisting the knife more instead.

“Stop! Stop, please!” He wanted to vomit twice over, for saying those words. But for all the movies he’d seen and stories he’d read about heroes resisting torture, nothing could prepare him for real pain. Not resisting it, anyway. If some empty words could get it to stop, then he’d fucking say them.

He remembered once a book he’d read, where one of the main characters was a torture survivor. The man had described in vivid detail how his permanently ruined body had been flayed, burned, cut and dug through, but it was the passages about having his teeth broken apart and the nerves prodded that made Jack’s body sick with worry.

The man smirked, and yanked the blade out. Jack screamed again, and threw his head back as he felt metal destroy muscle and skin and bone on the way out. But again, he grit his teeth, and forced himself to breathe on useless air; it stopped his screaming, and for the moment that was the only goal he could focus on.

The two guards at the door winced, a few times at that, and glanced between each other before looking to the two nutjobs intent on torturing him. They didn’t seem the same as the psychopaths. And, when he managed eye contact with them, he could feel the mind of a kine, like he should have been able to.

Not the two in front of him though. Jeremiah, and Angela, he couldn’t get past their eyes. Something in their gaze, something in them in general was blocking him, holding him at bay. But if he could tap into the other two, then it wasn’t the cuffs blocking his Kindred abilities, or not completely anyway. And his leg was healing, so the cuffs weren’t working some crazy magic magic to keep his vitae-infused blood from healing him. The cuffs were doing something, but not that.

Ever since he’d seen Lucas summon a bolt of lightning, he tried to keep an open mind about magic. Antoinette had called it Theban Sorcery. Made swallowing the fact they’d put some sort of enchanted cuffs on him easier.

“You’re young,” Angela said.

“ ... y-yeah ... you could say that.” Groaning, stifling a whimper, he looked down at his leg and the closing wound. His blood realigned the twisted and punctured bone, set its contents, and let him relax as the pain lowered from agonizing, to only extremely painful.

She reached out, grabbed his chin, and forced him to look her in her good eye. Hard hands, callouses and all. “What would Azamel want with you?”

Ugh, moving into territory of sensitive information. He shouldn’t tell them he was sort of an intermediary with the Uratha; they didn’t seem to know the werewolves were even in the city though. But Azamel wanted him for the same role, and he shouldn’t bring that up.