Chapter 50

~~Beatrice~~

She was starting to become envious.

Athalia was a bitch. A real, horrible, nasty bitch of a person. Only vamp Triss had ever seen talk to Athalia and not get chewed out or glared at was Jack, but it wasn’t Jack that Triss was envious of. It was Athalia, and that monster chick vibe she had going for her. Badass monster chick on the inside, perfectly normal, attractive woman on the outside.

“Fiona’s told me about you,” Triss said. “About your ... form, I guess?”

“ ... horror.”

“Sorry?”

“It’s our horror. The horror that lives in the nightmare. It is the nightmare.” She shrugged, and continued down through the black tunnel. Unlike the tunnel Beatrice had come from, this one had no working lights at all, and the further they went, the darker it got.

“That does sound badass.” And it was making Triss jealous. Nosferatu and horror were kindred spirits, but with Athalia, seemed like she was more than that. “And I’ve seen Fiona do some oddly impressive shit. It’s pretty neat stuff. Makes me kinda wish I was a—”

Athalia stopped, looked at her, and frowned. “You don’t really mean that.”

“I don’t?”

“ ... you’re a vampire. You don’t know what it’s like to ... be changed like this.”

“Fiona says—”

“Yeah well Fiona’s a stupid idealist. We’re not the same. The little thing inside you, hiding in shadows, tiny little wings and tiny little talons, is not the same as us. So fuck off and shut up.”

Oh god the melodrama was going to make Triss puke. This woman wasn’t just angry, she was anger incarnate, just a walking pile of livid and hateful.

“ ... so I’m a little thing?”

“You are. The thing inside you is.” She waved a hand aside like she was dismissing a fly. “Sometimes it looks like a rat, sometimes a bat or snake, and often, an owl. An insignificant creature that loves to hide in the shadows, instead of using them as the weapons they are.”

“And that would make Jacob what?”

Athalia snarled at her, even as she continued to walk without pause. Yeah, Jacob was one of those vamps she hated, with one of those tiny little shadow creatures in him, part of him, was him. A tiny creature, and this woman probably could not understand how it was able to kick her ass like she was a child. Worded like that, Triss would be angry too.

But Athalia didn’t retort, just chewed on her hate and kept walking.

“So, uh, Azamel is uh ... a pretty terrifying looking ... thing.”

“ ... she showed herself to you?”

“No, that’s what this eye is for.” Triss turned and pulled down on the cheek of her new eye. “Jacob had one too.”

“ ... I ... don’t understand.”

“You monsters think you’re so scary. Athalia, I have seen Jacob do shit that makes you monsters look like pussies. This eye is just a little bit of the crazy shit that man can summon.” Ok, maybe she shouldn’t have been rubbing it in the girl’s face that her boss was scarier than Athalia’s boss, but she couldn’t help indulge a little. My dad can beat up your dad. Or mom, in this case? “I can see little bits of the nightmare. And I can see you.”

“ ... and what do you think?”

“Kind of envious, honestly. You look like something from a Motorhead album cover.”

“And I suppose that means a lot of skulls and claws and black wings and shit.”

“Exactly.” Triss snapped her fingers and pointed at her, summoning her inner Fonzie. Athalia was a scary woman, but compared to the shit Jacob had been showing the Nos as of lately, it was manageable. And besides, Athalia was once human, and that was some even ground.

“ ... well, you would have gotten to see anyway.”

“Whatcha mean?”

“You heard Azamel. There’s something going on in one of our chambers. And you’re tagging along while I investigate, apparently.”

“Yeah, but where’s that? Other side of town, or ... or ... in the nightmare.”

It was Athalia’s turn to smirk, and she stepped into the final shadow of the curving tunnel. This far out from Azamel’s little nest, the shadow was now the unending blackness, and as far as Triss could tell, it went on endlessly. Pure, delightful darkness. Normally Triss would be fine with that, but after the Azlu shit, she didn’t want to be in the tunnels like this. The thought of getting more spiderwebs on her made her shiver, and rub her arms to try and dislodge the nonexistent, sticky webs.

Triss set her hand on the wall of the tunnel, and slowed down her pace. Couldn’t move quickly in this without risking tripping. “Fucking dark.”

“Monsters have different worlds, different realms, different things they like. The Eshmaki, like Fiona and myself, need darkness.”

“Darkness, right. So I ... shouldn’t pull out my phone then. Cause, you know, it has a light and—”

“Not yet.”

Alone in the dark with the scary-but-cool-but-major-bitch woman, Triss continued walking forward, and let the darkness swallow her. Nope, nothing wrong here, just a stroll through old, abandoned tunnels in complete black with a darkness nightmare monster thing. She kept walking, squinting, trying to see something, but it was no use, too damn dark. No choice but to keep walking, and listen to the quiet clack of her boots on concrete.

At least, until her footsteps started to change sounds. Weird, and worthy of her stopping to kneel down and touch the floor. Stone.

And that’s when it kicked in. Like a scene from Pulp Fiction, a needle full of adrenaline straight into the heart, every reflex in her body kicked in. Overload. She jumped up with a spin, and looked around. Still darkness, couldn’t see shit, and every muscle was tensing hard enough to hurt. She wasn’t in the tunnels anymore. And like a cat dumped into a new home with no warning, she wanted to get somewhere protected and safe so she could get her bearings.

“W-Where am I?”

“You may turn on your light now.”

White dots, two of them in the distance. They didn’t give off enough light to illuminate whatever it was they were in, but they were there, two white dots she recognized. Gulping all too loudly, Triss pulled out her phone and turned on the light.

Athalia, in all her angel of death glory. An enormous torso, skin taught and bones exposed, covered in serrated spikes. A skull, with a tiny white dot in the center of each large eye socket. Enormous black angel wings. And best of all, Athalia had no legs, just a dangling spinal chord that followed her as she flew—hovered around. Her wings weren’t flapping, just taking up space as the abomination moved along the cave floor and through the darkness.

Cave floor. For a second she thought maybe Athalia had found a cave entrance in the tunnels; certainly possible with the shit Jacob did in his free time. But, no, this couldn’t have been a cave like that, cause when Triss looked up, she could see stars.

She shined the light at the cave walls, and gulped again. Her new eye wasn’t showing her any flickering, waving, or oddities anymore. Now, she was in the nightmare, and the eye had no more secrets to expose. Just darkness, endless, and deep.

“The fuck...” It was some sort of vertical cave, a pit, a giant hole in the ground. A spiraling edge followed the contours of the enormous hole, and went down, and down, and as she shined the light into the black, she stared down into its depths. The light couldn’t reach the bottom. She pointed the light back up against the walls, and tried to see to the other side of the cave, but the light couldn’t reach. Back up, she stared at the twinkling stars, their light unable to penetrate the depths of the hole. Hole wasn’t a strong enough word, more like someone had taken a drill a thousand feet wide, and decided to try and dig to the depths of the Earth.

Terrifying, and thrilling.

The angel of death continued on. It really didn’t fit; or at least, Athalia didn’t fit her horror. The shadow, the dripping black mist, the onyx wings, the giant torso and dangling spinal cord, all just silhouettes in the darkness except under the light of Triss’s phone, that were right at home in the cave. But Athalia herself was a bitch, a mean, hateful bitch, and the form she carried with her looked like it belonged on some sort of greater entity, like a personification of death or inevitability or something.

Then again, woman hadn’t said a thing since she transformed, or exposed her other half, or whatever was a politically correct way of describing her horror half. And from what Fiona said, the nightmares this woman had as a child had something to do with this horror, this thing, this death personification floating before Beatrice. What sort of horrible things would those kind of dreams do to someone, with those wings haunting their thoughts, those white, glowing dots for eyes in the black, and those claws tearing at the ground? The sort of nightmares that made you pull your arm and legs under the covers nice and snug. The sort of nightmares Triss wished she had the power to inflict with her nightmare discipline; purely for defensive purposes of course.

Much as it must have been a horrible experience, to have this creature haunting her dreams, she did look god damn badass.

Triss had to jog a few moments to catch up, and jogging wasn’t so easy with the stone beneath her being an unpleasant mix of smooth, wet, slippery, and randomly jagged with tiny drops. But she caught up, and started walking beside the angel of death. Just, a giant, floating torso thing, with its spinal cord hanging out and almost hitting the dark stone Triss was walking on. Christ.

“I uh ... don’t suppose I should try and pull a Jack, and start talking about personal shit, right?”

The creature turned to look at her, enormous skull blending into the obsidian around her except for the two white dots, a foot apart. “I do not suggest it.” Oh damn that voice, a whisper in the dark if there ever was one.

“Can you tell me something about where we are then? Cause, I mean, yeah, this might be the norm for you guys, but vamps spend their every night and day in the city. I mean, I haven’t left Dolareido since I was embraced, cause it’s not like I could handle sunlight.”

The enormous creature turned to look at her, but didn’t stop its slow hovering down the sloping path that circled the giant hole. With the darkness as her backdrop, it was hard to ever truly see any of the monster’s features, just bits and pieces as she swayed, body catching hints of starlight or Triss’s phone light.

“We are here to ensure Fiona is not in danger, and to kill her attackers if she is. I have no reason to share my secrets with you.”

“Not like I’m trying to—”

“Aren’t you? Jacob and his eye allowed him to see me, Mark, Azamel, as you explained.” Her voice caught between a whisper and a harsher rasp, and clawed down Triss’s spine. “The same eye you now have.” She didn’t use her lips to speak; barely had lips at all, skin so tight on the face it was basically a skull. No nose. Her voice just emitted from her, as if using a mouth with a tongue was something this entity was beyond needing.

“Yeah, the eye lets us have a peek at you guys and your nightmare worlds. But—”

“Leeches. Sneaking, cowardly leeches.” The arm came out, and pushed Triss. Not the arm of the tall, slender black woman Athalia, but this dark shadow creature, and its enormous arm, with bone claws that dripped more of the black mist around her. It was more than enough to knock the vamp over, and she cursed as she started to roll down the slope.

“Fuck!” She didn’t go far, but a little ways was enough for her to roll against the wall of the enormous cave where it met the path, and come to a stop in some bones resting against the stone. “You bitch, I could have ... have ... holy shit.” She pointed her phone at the bones, at the walls, and then, gasped.

The tunnel wasn’t just a big hole drilled into the Earth, with a pathway that circled the side all the way down like a screw. It was a graveyard. Bodies, randomly spread out against the wall and ground. Limbs with clothes still on them. Some fresh, or at least only a year or so old. Most were far older, skeletons, of varying sizes, some far too small to be adults.

“There was a time, centuries ago, when bandits and raiders were as common as fleas.” The angel of death hovered past the corpses and skeletons where they amassed in a pile against the wall, before passing it and moving further down the slope. And once Triss caught up with her again, she couldn’t help but notice more, and more, and more bodies they passed. “There was a legend, of a horrible place where these bandits and raiders would toss their kills. And, so the legend went, many of those tossed into the great hole of the dead were still alive when thrown in.” The demon motioned with one of its giant hands of bone toward the wall, where another pile of bones had grouped up in the grooves of dark rock. “And some survived the landing, only to die of their injuries, screaming up into the emptiness above them for help.”

“ ... yea, that’s pretty fucking dark.”

“Indeed.” It, she, nodded, and continued once again. “An exaggeration. In my travels I found this place, I found the bones, the dead, centuries gone and buried. Not so nearly as large as this, but then dreams are prone to exaggeration. The fears of the dying carved this chamber into the primordial dream.”

“ ... I thought you weren’t going to share your secrets with me.”

“There is power in legends.” The dark angel shrugged, a strange motion for shadow to make, and gestured to the pit in the center of the vertical cave. “Begotten feed on fear, as Fiona has no doubt told you. For the others to fear us, fear me, is to my benefit.”

“You think I fear you?”

“Of course you fear me.” Athalia came closer, and Triss stepped back. The fuck was she supposed to do? Athalia might as well have been a literal angel of death for all Triss could see, and the fucker knew it too.

“You really underestimate vamps.”

The monster snorted, a weird, half rasp half groan noise that echoed off the rock walls, before she, it, they continued along. “Perhaps. It is easy to underestimate a cockroach until you try and kill one yourself. You are notoriously difficult to kill, and you spread in much the same way.”

“Yeah well, a great man once said eventually we’ll all be dead, and the only ones left are gonna be five cockroaches and Keith Richards.”

“ ... and you take pride in this?”

“A bit, yeah.” She shrugged, adjusted her tank top, and resumed the walk into the endless pit of black. “So, pit of death, some sort of fear-created ... thing, place ... thing?”

“Yes. You vampires know of only the physical. Azamel tells me both Jacob and Antoinette have long sought to touch the borders of other realms, but you ... you’re so limited. What could you know of spirits, or the other realms, the layers of existence where the universe is ... no, I waste my breath.” The monster waved a dismissing, titan hand, and floated out over the empty hole. Triss had to jog down the slope — fucking scary — to catch up as Athalia landed on the other side, before continuing down. What a bitch. “What do you know of H. P. Lovecraft?”

“Just the basics. Cthulhu, fish men, knowledge so unimaginable that it’s capable of making you go ... insane...”

The monster turned to her, and Triss froze solid as she came in closer, and closer, until the colossal face of nigh bone was almost up to her. The dark skull was easily five times the size of a normal skull.

“If you dreamed a dream, infantile vampire, a dream that let your mind go, that let it reach up and out of this single realm of the physical, it could scrape against the walls protecting it from the outside.” The thing hovered down the cave slope further still, until at long last their walk came to what seemed some kind of bottom. “If you had any idea what sort of entities waited for you, just waiting for you to be stupid enough to leave the safe confines of your little world, you’d never sleep again.” The floor of the pit cave was covered in the dead, in bones and clothes and empty bags. Some bones belonged to horses, and others to dogs. “You think Azamel is terrifying? You have no idea, cockroach, just how terrifying the grander existence of things beyond understanding can be.”

“I never really did get the cosmic horror thing.” She shrugged, and gestured to the graveyard they’d started walking through. “Call me simple but I think spooky things in the black are scarier.”

“You are simple.” The entity returned the shrugged, colossal shoulders move its colossal wings with the motion, before it continued along up and over a pile of bones.

Climbing bones didn’t go as easily as Triss figured. They moved or broke under her feet, and thrice she fell down onto her face, bones meeting her and jabbing up into her. Many shattered where they were once connected, and hands or feet fell apart, raining down the sides of the hill of the dead and sending Triss sliding down along with them. Like trying to climb a hill of nothing but ice and loose snow, ugh.

She gave up, and walked around, one hand to the stone wall, the other pointing her flashlight at the bones beneath her. “This isn’t real, right?”

“It is real.”

“Thought this was a nightmare?”

“It is.”

“I ... oh.” Ok, that put it into better perspective than all of Jacob and Athalia’s ranting combined. Nightmares were real, actually real. The crazy shit the mind could only manage a glimpse of during dreams, was real. Yeah, ok, now she was starting to get a chill.

“This way.” The monster disappeared into another hole in the wall, big enough for her wings and titanic bones to fit through. Triss jogged after her, hopping up over bones and onto any rock or empty space where her feet could land on stone. “Turn your light off.”

“Right.” Fiona had said she was a monster that dealt with darkness, and had said Athalia was the same. Did they need it to function, or did they just prefer it? Everything was such a mystery with these damn things, and Fiona either didn’t know the details, or wasn’t willing to provide them. She didn’t blame the girl, but then maybe she and Jacob wouldn’t have had to come here, with a witch eye each, if they knew as much about the Begotten as they did Kindred, or the Uratha for that matter.

Christ, what the fuck else existed out there she didn’t know about or had never seen. Ghosts? Mummies? Fucking fairies?

She almost tripped as her boot got stuck in mud. If it was mud. She froze again, and took a long sniff of the air. Humidity, heat, water, rot, and mulch. The cave had connected to some kind of jungle or something.

“Is this—” Gunfire cut her off. She ducked low, and blinked into the darkness ahead of them. Or, ahead of her. Athalia was nowhere to be seen in the black, and the damn thing hovered around so it wasn’t like she made footsteps, or breathed. Triss grit her teeth and waited, listening, straining her ears to adapt to the new environment. A jungle, an actual jungle, humidity and heat and weird noises and all.

It couldn’t have been the same place she just came from. Wherever she’d been, whatever nightmare that was, it’d be silent, and cold. But without a door or gate or some magical, mystical watchamacallit to make the transition more notable, she’d entered someplace new, someplace hot, someplace where the environment itself pressed down on her.

She crept along, crouched and silent, claws against the mud, the roots and shit beneath her. A jungle, it had to be a jungle. Fiona’s jungle. Girl had mentioned it but Triss hadn’t really given it much thought, since Begotten were strange and it was easier to think of them like that, easier to dismiss the girl’s words as weird metaphor or something. Not a metaphor, not a metaphor at all. And as Triss moved forward, some light started to reach her, enough for her eyes to adjust and see the bark, the mud, the moistness and moss and fungus and mushrooms and fucking insects. Oh god the insects, everywhere, creepy crawly things with a thousand legs and others with none at all.

More gunfire, and screams. She continued along, summoned her vitae, and hid herself in the cloak of night. With this much darkness, trees, and vines dangling around, she’d be able to walk up to someone and punch them before they realized she was near.

Or at least, that would have been nice. But as she came closer to the gunfire, the sound of voices joined in, and then lights, far stronger lights than Triss’s phone, cut through the black. And then the toppling of a tree.

She’d never heard a tree fall. How could she have? City girl her whole life, and second life, and the closest she’d ever heard to a tree falling was in movies. But there was no mistaking the creaking of wood, and then the tearing of vines and breaking of branches in a crescendo of weight and an impending crash. The tree was huge, so very huge, so very fucking huge, and it tore a through the canopy until moonlight bled through the wound.

Two moons. Holy shit.

Holy shit! She jumped back and scampered as someone fell in front of her, and landed hard enough to splat against the mud and splash it against her clothes. Some black dude in a suit. The fuck?

~~Eric~~

That hurt. That really fucking hurt. His head didn’t hit anything too hard on the way down, but riding a giant tree down as it tumbled onto its brethren through the black night of a jungle, wasn’t fun. Close to the bottom, when gravity decided it didn’t like Eric anymore, the man fell and crashed down through brush, vine, and darkness. Mud greeted him, and softened his landing as much as a bellyflop in a swimming pool would. Better than breaking all his bones, but it still really fucking hurt.

He sat up, groaning, rubbing his head. Covered in mud, and Fiona’s blood, and god only knew what else, whatever sort of shit, literal or not, you found on a jungle floor.

He froze. A woman was staring at him. The light from the torn-open canopy hit her enough he could see her decently well, or at least he should have been able to. Something was making it hard, something pushing at his eyes, causing them to slide off of her, and he had to squint and focus to force his gaze back onto the stranger. She was only two feet away, in literal punching distance, but it was damn hard to look at her.

She had one normal eye, and one snake eye. Fucking weird. They stared at each other, both unmoving, his heart pounding and his breath panting. But not hers. No breath, no heartbeat.

And just like before, his gears kicked in. Again, adrenaline spiked his system, and he found himself breathing in the scent of this newcomer, trying to analyze the threat they posed, trying to figure out friend or foe, or where they fucking came from.

She was doing the same thing. Expression on her face was—holy shit she had extra teeth, extra teeth where her cheeks should have been. Her raven hair hid it by framing her face, and so did the darkness, but the piercing moonlight and his new eyes managed to catch glimpses of them. Weird crocodile teeth, sharper though, and big enough that it was easy to imagine them tearing off limbs whole.

“ ... I ... uh—”

She held up a hand and put one of her fingers to her lips. She had claws.

“Don’t move, don’t speak, or I’ll rip you in half.”

He almost said something. Very a much a ‘don’t look down’ sort of situation, being told not to say anything so suddenly. But after he stared into her very, very weird eyes for a moment, he nodded. Girl was sending him the same sort of signals Jessy and Natasha did, some sort of sneaky-but-deadly vibe, the sort of vibe he imagined anyone would get when walking around poisonous snakes.

“Work for Jeremiah?”

One of them had said that name, Jeremiah. He shook his head. Girl didn’t know he wasn’t one of these hunters Fiona was dealing with.

“How can I trust you?”

He gulped, and gestured to his clothes. Not like these hunters were in suits, and unlike him, they had weaponry.

“ ... good enough I guess. But, tell me, name of the person who let you in here?”

“Fiona. Scot girl. Asked me to help her follow four people. Said she wanted to find someone named Jack.” Spilling the beans. Well, in all the chaos, this girl with the crocodile mouth seemed like she was on Fiona’s side, and that was his best option at the moment.

“And—” She raised her hands to protect herself as the sound of gunfire, and the sound of tearing trees started up once more. He did too, and threw himself to the side behind a trunk as gunfire ripped through the leaves.

And then, claws. Bone claws. Giant, massive, black claws tore through the leaves around him, over him, and black feathers covered the sky over their heads. Spikes, serrated, jagged, ripped at the bark and the vines, pulled down the forest with the motion of the titan, and earned the ire of the hunters. Shotgun blasts fired in the direction of the damage, and both he and the new woman found themselves face down in the mud.

Another monster. This one had wings, and some sort of torso of bone. Its beady white eyes, tiny, betrayed what must have been a huge skull. Streaks of reflecting black cut through the jungle, curved, showing only glimpses of its form, of spikes and horns, of ribs. No legs. No fucking legs. As it moved, hovering through its new path of carved and ruined jungle, he could see its spine dangling behind it.

Death. He was looking at death, moving around, and hunting in the darkness.

The hunters appeared in a clearing, their backs to each other, pistols and shotguns and two special knives drawn. The moment something moved, they shot it, and Eric winced as he recognized the sound of Fiona’s new, monster scream. But, as he peeked out from behind the tree trunk, he caught a glimpse of the spider woman. Wounded, but alive, and still trucking, pulling herself up into trees and slashing out at the four hunters.

Damn the four shmucks were so outclassed, but they kept on fighting, each firing into the black, and every so often, they earned an alien snarl from the darkness. This time it was one Eric didn’t recognize, some sort of raspy thing without the texture of a human voice. The other one, the other thing with black wings, it hissed and rasped and disappeared into the black as quickly as it came. A bullet managed to hit it, clipped one of the bones, and only then did Eric notice it had skin, gaunt to the point it wrapped the bone like saran wrap clinging to leftovers. Bits of the black material tore away, and blended into the mud of the dark jungle.

And then shit got even more crazy. Universe just felt like dumping it on, shitting down his throat with as much insanity as he could possibly handle. Another dude showed up.

“Get down!”

The crocodile mouth girl didn’t listen to the new voice. Instead, she sank her claws into one of the trees and started climbing, while Eric was more than happy to throw his body to the muck and cover his head, as he watched the man pull a grenade from his trench coat, and toss it into the forest.

An explosion, his first explosion. He wasn’t prepared for the kinetic force of it striking out like a wave, or the sound of it. And he wasn’t prepared for the debris, the shredding bark and branches cutting through the air. Somehow, crocodile lady was prepared, and she held on as she climbed higher.

“How did you get in here!?” Fiona called out from the black.

The newest newcomer laughed, and wiped his thumb on his lip, content to keep his secrets. He took out another grenade. And then, another. And the jungle forest screamed in agony as the man destroyed it with reckless abandon. Two more grenades immediately after, into the darkness, into the chaos. Not like the stranger had to worry about casualties, not with his four buddies beside him.

Eric certainly had to fucking worry. He did his best, stayed down and covered his head, but this fucker was tossing his grenades around like confetti, and they got closer, and closer, until everything around Eric was shredded trees falling over. If he didn’t move, he was dead. If he got up, he was dead; the hunters weren’t asking questions, just shooting first.

He started rolling, staying as low to the ground as he could, but there was only so much he could do to avoid what was turning into a giant fuckfest of carnage and mayhem. Get up, and die. Stay down, and die a bit later once one of those grenades landed beside you, or one of the hunters noticed him. More and more of the forest was being destroyed, so more of the dual moonlight was reaching them.

“Such a young monster,” the trench coat fucker said. Might as well have been wearing sunglasses at night. “Got a name?”

“I—”

“Don’t tell him anything,” the blackness said. That angel of death thing, no doubt. Both Fiona and its voice sounded horrific, but the death thing’s voice was the sort of raspy you expected to hear in a graveyard when you were looking for ghosts. Almost like a whisper that was somehow louder than yelling.

“Athalia, you really should just come out and let me kill you. Think your daughter is going be as nice as I am?” Man’s voice flirted on playful, and angry. Reminded Eric of a bar before a fight erupted, when people were pounding their chests, but thought they were being sly about it by using shitty jokes and sarcasm.