Chapter 68

~~Jack~~

The meeting at Bloodlust went about as well as he expected. There was awkwardness, and strangeness, weirdness, and all the synonyms. But once they realized Antoinette wasn’t there to destroy them or spy on them, they seemed to settle in. Triss turned into a punk, Jen turned into a slut, Fiona was all giggles, and even Athalia managed to crack a smile. Damien got less defensive, and so did Arturo. By the end of it, Jack was finally able to relax.

And then the phone rang.

They didn’t have long until sun up, maybe an hour, and doing more recon was a bad idea. But this was too important to not investigate immediately. Antoinette went back to her tower, where she could better relay the information to her thralls, through her network, and whatever it was a Prince did that kept the city running. Jen, Triss, Athalia, and Fiona all left, unaware of what Daniel had found, only that the rest of them had to leave asap. They’d find out sooner or later; this information went around the Kindred underground, no matter how hard people tried to keep it secret. Natasha, Damien, Matthew, and Arturo all took a ride in the Invictus car Jack called. A tight fit.

843 Baker’s Street was the apartment building Isabella had given Jack. Now it was the apartment building they were driving to, at Daniel’s behest. Part of Jack wanted to tell the man his solo efforts were getting in the way of their investigation, and that he might have compromised what could have been a good ambush opportunity; or worse, gotten himself killed. Bad idea. And besides, the man knew what he was doing.

The five of them walked through the front of the shitty old apartment building, down the shitty old apartment building stairs, along the shitty old apartment building carpet in the hallway, stained and dirty, past the dented, scratched walls, and down into the basement of the shitty old apartment building. Even if the ritual wasn’t here, he wouldn’t have been surprised to find a corpse or two buried in the building’s guts. There were some storage lockers down here, with open fence showing all their contents; no rituals would be done in this room. But at the end of the room, there was another door, and the group of them moved through it a little slower now, as the lighting grew less, and the world grew quiet.

There was another stairway, going down, and at this point, he was starting to get the same vibes he caught from Athalia’s stairway into hell. It was dark, it was deep, and it was confined. Claustrophobia. Gulping, Jack stepped along, Damien ahead of him, Tash and her wolves behind him. The door led to another door, one with an sliding view window, ready to accept passwords. This door led to a stairway. And this stairway led to a door.

And that door opened to show the same ritual.

“ ... wow.” Damien stopped, blocking them, until Jack tapped him on the shoulder. “Sorry.” Stepping in, the Mekhet looked around, in blatant shock over the sight.

Jack didn’t want to look at the sight. Once was enough.

“Same as last time,” Daniel said, and pointed up.

And like a bunch of lemmings, they all looked up, and gasped. The skeleton on the ceiling had another picture attached, but, like Daniel said, it wasn’t Jack. Thank god, he couldn’t stomach that a second time.

“Eric?” Matt said.

“Eric.” Art said.

Eric. Why was the picture of Eric? Shit. Shit shit. What was the pattern there? If the ritual was finding people the hunters could use to get close to the Prince, Eric did not fit that bill.

Like last time, the walls were covered in symbols, written in blood, and some in what looked like charcoal. The tables that lined the walls were metal this time, and someone had still carved symbols into them, scratching the strange shapes into the metal surface. Many had symbols painted in red next to them, and the smell of rotting blood was evident. If the old woman had been here recently, and the blood was already rotting, then the sacrifice might have taken multiple trips to complete.

A bird skull. A cow skull. A horse skull. Same as last time, symbols painted around a giant circle on the floor, something he would be sure the Circle were responsible for, if he didn’t already have someone else to suspect. Jacob and his witches insisted it wasn’t them, and Azamel was sure it was this strange shaman woman. But, it was hard to imagine humans, kine, doing this, stringing someone up, killing them, burying every surface around them in symbols, while dissecting them.

Disgusting.

“Wait,” he said. “Julias said he and Jessy found Eric in the sewers after his first change, with Athalia. Think he talked to Azamel?”

“I w-wouldn’t be surprised,” Tash said.

Then Azamel was a link. Which made sense, considering she was the hunters’ target all along. But others had talked to her as well. What made Eric and Jack different from the others? They were both young as fuck, in paranormal terms, but that hardly seemed like a decent link.

“This is sick,” Damien said, standing by one of the tables, and sifting through the piles of papers. “Someone drew a dissection.”

A dissection, for the most part. While most of the pictures showed calculated removal of skin and muscle, a few showed some rather barbaric tearing.

“I think it’s that Black Blood spirit,” Art said.

Jack froze, before slowly turning his head to look at the man. Art wasn’t looking his way, instead looking up at the skeleton pinned to the ceiling.

Jack did his best to sound like he didn’t know what they were talking about. “What do you mean?” Not that he didn’t trust Art and Matt; their hearts seemed to be in the right place, but he didn’t want them interfering with him learning as much as he could.

“Old, big, nasty spirit, an Incarna.” Art looked in Daniel’s direction, squinting at the statue in a trench coat, before looking back up at the hanging skeleton. “I don’t know, honestly. Those red wraiths seem to be interested in this stuff, and those red wraiths are connected to Black Blood, and—”

“And we don’t know.” Shrugging, Matt got down onto a knee, and looked over the enormous circle symbol on the floor. “I smell ... chemicals, old.”

Daniel nodded. “This was probably a bunker set up for producing or storing drugs. Professional.” As professional as you could get in Devil’s Corner, Jack figured.

Red wraiths and Black Blood. Connections he’d already made, but knowing that’s what Art and Matt were thinking meant it was a good one.

“Triss said something,” Jack said, “about you not being invited?”

“Yeah. She and that other witch are getting into deep shit with Jacob, and Black Blood. Everyone’s blowing it off, but—”

“We’re not blowing it off.” Daniel shook his head and adjusted his glasses, but otherwise did not move. “I’m well aware of Jacob’s interactions with Black Blood. These rituals are new, however.”

While they chatted, Damien did nothing but stare. Tash looked disturbed by the sight as well, but didn’t take long to push past it and start cataloging things. Jack joined her, and sighed as he looked at the pictures stacked on the tables around the room. What once probably held vials and jars, now held piles of evidence of the occult, with a blatant obsession with the macabre and grotesque.

He picked up one picture, and stared at the accurate, detailed tendons. Why the artist had to pay so much loving attention to all the minute particulars of what lay underneath skin and muscle, he couldn’t fathom. Those red wraiths wanted a piece of Fiona, to see her guts and whatnot, and he assumed that that was connected to this.

But was it? Those red wraiths were cutting everything apart and blatantly obsessed with getting their hands on flesh. The ritual was about gore as well, but different. The pictures in front of him would have been at home on a surgeon’s desk; most of them, anyway.

“Matt,” he said.

“Mm?”

“You interrupted something being done by the witches?”

“Yeah. Triss, Jen, and that Jacob asshole, were performing some sort of ritual, and communicating with Black Blood. There was a corpse there, and a ritual bowl, full of guts and whatnot.”

Jack winced, and held one of the drawings in front of him, facing the table, his back to Matt. “ ... messy?”

“Extremely.”

Then there was a disconnect. Black Blood and its red wraiths, if they were its red wraiths, had some sort of interest in flesh, but a total disregard for acquiring it cleanly or keeping it intact. The person performing this dissection and this ritual was far more concerned with exact detail, patterns, and a strange combination of anatomy and occult knowledge.

Much as it’d be easy to blame Jacob and Black Blood, it was seeming more and more like they and the rituals weren’t connected; not directly, at least.

“We need to find Eric,” he said. “But—”

“But the sun will be up soon,” Damien said, finally lowering his eyes from the corpse above. “What do we do about this?”

“I’ll lock it down.” Nodding, Daniel gestured to the door. “Let’s leave, and get some place safe for sunrise. Take Art and Matt with you, Natasha, until you are safe at the tower.”

It was hard to not smile at that, Daniel, being protective of Natasha, in his own, official, cold and distant sort of way. Jack had no right to judge, but still, cute.

“I’ll go with her, I suppose,” he said. They were going to same place, after all. “Thanks for showing me, sheriff. I know you didn’t have to.”

“I messaged the Prince, Mister Terry, not you. But I do not disagree in involving you. You’ve proved your worth.”

Jack smirked at the man. Proved his worth. He was talking about Lucas; which Art and Matt didn’t know about, if he guessed right.

They left, and headed back to Elysium Tower to sleep. Hopes up, hopes down, Hella’s sighting proving very true, but in the end, wasted. At least her picture had confirmed they knew what the shaman and her companions looked like. Something was better than nothing.

~~Eric~~

Come sunrise, he took the opportunity of his temporary freedom from the watchful eye of vampires, to do fuck all. He drifted around, watched a shitty movie, bought a couple burgers, only to eat the meat and nothing but. Someone asked if he was doing keto, and he almost said no, but on second glance, he had to admit he was. In the past week, he’d eaten nothing but meats, muscle and organ, and other strange things that were ultimately just parts of an animal.

He was tempted to visit Azamel. Of his three options, the Begotten seemed to be the only group willing to be basically hands off with him. Avery wanted him under her thumb to some degree, and the vamps were blatant about wanting to control him entirely. Jessy said he should just do whatever he wanted, play the field, like an athlete with options. A good idea, except that the three groups were liable to either kill him, or get him killed, if he fucked up.

The more he thought about it, the more he found himself leaning toward Azamel. The only thing she asked is for him to try and help her if she and the others were under attack. Of all the options, that seemed the nicest; except that, of course, hunters were already in the city, trying to kill her. But they were probably going to try and kill him too, so that was almost a moot point.

And for some stupid reason, he liked the monsters. He liked Fiona for obvious reasons, but Athalia? Bitch. Mark? Asshole. Azamel? Colossal bitch. Those three probably pissed everyone off around them, merely by existing. That was appealing, for whatever reason. Maybe seeing a bit of himself in them.

The werewolves all seemed cool, but he got a bit of a military vibe from them. One for all, all for one, no man left behind, blah blah. No thanks. The vamps wore their mafia motif on their sleeves; though, he’d yet to talk to a Carthian, so maybe they were different.

The vamps, the Invictus, were also writing his cheques. That meant they owned his new life. It also meant they owned his dad’s life. If he did something to piss them off, that’d be the end of that. And it wasn’t like he could just ignore everything Avery had to say; christ, he ran into some fucking random spirits just last night. Should he have hunted them down, or chased them back to wherever, or was there something else he was supposed to do?

Why did he care?

He went to a hotel. Random hotel, random room, paid in cash, nothing that would give him away. Kat had food; thankfully she could graze on food and not get fat, too lazy to make the effort to gorge herself. Here, he could close his eyes, forget about his troubles, the ridiculousness of his new life, and breathe. That’s all he needed to do, breathe, relax, and let the stress melt away.

Of course, that wasn’t going to happen.

The woods. The forest. A riverbed at his feet. The gentle, lulling sounds of water cresting over small rocks and pebbles. Wind, soft and soothing against his fur as it rustled the leaves of the trees around him. He sat by the river on his haunches, paws wet against the pebbles that dipped into the water, gibbous moon above. In the distance was Dolareido; he recognized the tall buildings, skyscrapers, and the glow of casino lights.

Would it be so bad, if he stayed here? The forest behind him, city in front of him, both in his world, both a part of him.

No, it wouldn’t.

He took a long, deep breath, and sighed. If he didn’t know any better, he’d think he was relaxed.

Breathe it again. Smell that? The woods, water, life and death in a nice balance. What else do you smell?

Asphalt and sex and metal and alcohol, from the city, on the breeze.

You breathe that, breathed it your whole life. The city is in your blood, in your lungs, and it’s your duty to defend it.

I never asked for duty.

You never asked to breathe.

I should be thankful for a life I didn’t ask for? Gracious? Sounds like a Johnny Cash song.

It could be.

He snorted, and looked down at the river. A wolf looked back at him, a normal wolf. Eric was a wolf now, a werewolf in truth, some sort of ancient entity’s bloodline reborn in the human body. Father Wolf and Mother Luna were his new parents? Was Father Wolf a better parent than his dad in the hospital?

Yes and no. It was so long ago, I can barely remember. His children killed him. He prowled the borders between spirit and solid, flesh and ephemera, and kept things in order. A tough job, considering how thin the lines between Hisil and Gurihal were. A horrible mistake, killing him, I think. It led to—

The river exploded, water erupting in a cloud of cold force that sent Eric flying back. He spun through the air before crashing into the ground, rolling and rolling, until rock and earth tore off clumps of fur mixed with blood. What the fuck what the fuck what the fuck.

Eric, shaking, head pulsing, forced himself up onto his paws, and stared out toward the river. It was a small stream, a foot deep; nothing should have been jumping out of it, let alone exploding out of it. But water continued to rain down from above, and the river itself churned and boiled, as if a million piranha were swarming some drowning fool.

Shadows crawled out of the water. Tall, wide, like curtains against the backdrop of the night sky. The city was behind it, and soon hidden from view as the curtains spread, edges smooth, and body completely opaque. Several hooks, or nails, were at the top of each curtain, a corner. It was almost like he was looking at a pair of enormous bat wings. Two pairs of wings? Four arches, four spans that covered the world in obsidian, before disappearing into the water below.

An arm shot out from the water, and slammed down into the ground before Eric. A mostly human arm, but the skin was dark, black, tinted with strange shades of gray, like metal, and enormous claws. Then another arm ... and another ... and another.

Whatever this thing was, this shadow clawing out of the depths of his dream, it had four wings, and four arms.

It roared, an alien sound, deep and rumbling, and with a vocal fry and tear like a metal singer scream. It came up onto the shore of pebbles, and the small rocks were crushed under the weight of its colossal talons. Two legs at least, but a long tail, slithering left and right like a fucking dragon’s, dangled behind the entity.

“This is the one,” it said. It could talk.

Eric looked up. The moon was gone. There was still light; he was in a dream after all, and shit didn’t have to be logical. But, the moon was gone, vanished, like it was afraid of this monster. And the voice was gone. Instead, a new voice replaced it, this thing’s, a voice of guttural growls and harsh, raspy vocal fries.

Whatever this thing was, it was twelve feet tall. Good fucking god.

Eric backed up, and snarled at it, ears down and back against the fur of his head. He was a wolf, and these things came naturally. But he wasn’t a wolf. He was Eric. And Eric was fucking terrified.

He backed away, and let out a barking howl at the monster. It stared at him, two giant horns piercing the sky. Its eyes glowed red and amber, like lava. Its mass caused the earth to break apart underneath it, as it shifted its weight with its new stance, standing tall in front of Eric. It spread its wings, and blotted out the sky.

“Jeremiah will have you, and you will answer his questions.” It took another step toward him, and Eric took a few steps back to keep distance. Each step the monster took, the claws sank through the rock beneath it, like butter.

“Jeremiah? The fuck does he want with me?” Hey, he could talk. Right, a dream, rules didn’t matter.

But his dreams weren’t normal dreams. He didn’t control these things, these sleeping hallucinations; and this invader didn’t belong. Every hair on his furry body stood up with animal aggression, and he bared his teeth as he snarled and barked at the titan walking toward him.

It didn’t like that. It sprinted forward, shredding the ground while launching itself toward him. Eric turned, and fled. Run, get the fuck away, get the fuck away!

The forest. There was a forest. Safe place, his hunting ground, side by side with Dolareido, his other hunting ground. Two sides to the coin, wolf and man. He could hide here, or turn the tables.

The monster didn’t agree. As Eric forced his aching, bruised body past a couple of trees, the monster slammed its mass into them, and broke them. Trunks three feet thick snapped, exploding bark and shards of wood, and sending the trees crashing into others. The forest died around Eric, trees spinning out of control and breaking upon others. The thickest trees survived the impacts, and the smaller shattered, showering the flattening land with twigs, leaves, and chaos.

Eric’s dream body was big, for a canine, but still only a wolf. One-forty, maybe one-fifty pounds. This thing chasing him was at least twenty times that much. It reached out with one of its four arms, and slashed out, claws slicing through the wood and sending more trees toppling. All this little dog could do was run and hide, scampering underneath fallen trees that left a foot of room to crawl under.

Why didn’t it answer his question? And if it wanted to catch him for Jeremiah, it wasn’t doing a good job. It was going to fucking kill him, drop a tree on him, or fucking step on him. A glance back showed the beast kept its four wings against its back, folded tight, while the four arms rendered the forest into mulch.

“You can’t hide, Uratha.”

The blood curdling noise echoed through the trees, until Eric felt it dig into his spine, serrated, iron hot needles stabbing into his back. His muscles twitched and cringed, and Eric shook his head as he tried to dislodge the voice from his ears. He couldn’t. Couldn’t fight this thing. Couldn’t attack this thing. Couldn’t do anything but run. Run where? He was going to die. It was going to catch him and it was going to kill him.

He kept moving. The forest greeted him, familiar, home. The trails where prey ran, the sights and sounds and smells, he knew them all. The little flits of drifting essence, the ephemera entities, spirits, manifesting, growing, building up, becoming. He sped past a critter, a squirrel maybe, body glowing green and partly see-through, eyes deep and dark. There was an owl, with eyes like the night sky. There was a fox with several tails, and it screeched before disappeared into the forest, as did the others. Everything wanted to get away from the intruder, the Goliath, ripping and tearing its way through the green and brown of the woods.

Where was the voice? Gone. It abandoned him, left him to run from this monster alone. And it was gaining on him. He threw his belly to the forest floor, and forced himself under a giant log, something ancient and part of the land, something that offered him a nod with eyes opening in the lines of the tree’s bark.

The monster didn’t care. It slammed all four of its hands down into the enormous piece of ancient wood, and ripped it apart. In the shower of bits of bark and death, it threw its mass forward, taking down two more trees with each shoulder, and sending them forward in a mad spin of inertia. One of them hit another tree, and went into a spin, bouncing around against rock and earth until one of its branches caught Eric in his side.

Pain. He’d always thought you weren’t supposed to feel pain in a dream, not pain like this, pain that scorched up the spine and gave you a headache, made you want to vomit. Pain silenced for a moment, before it doubled again when his body collided with something, the length of his wolf body curving around it before he slumped to the ground. A stump had blocked his flight path with all the grace of a car crash.

The world blurred around him. His body was heavy. His fingers didn’t respond; right, he had paws now, not hands. But he knew how to use paws, and they weren’t responding. His lungs had stopped working, diaphragm no longer pulling down. Nothing was working. He was a lump, a pile of flesh, pulsing with agony and crying tears — that’s why everything was blurry, his eyes were filled with tears. Or, blood.

The monster crouched down over him, glowing red eyes glaring into him. Its face looked human, for the most part, except for the massive horns, and as it growled, shark teeth joined the list of inhuman features. One of its four hands reached out, and picked him up. He was a wolf, against a twelve-foot gargoyle creature, and he was going to die.

The monster grabbed his head with one hand, his back legs with another, and started to tear him in half. No questions, no words, nothing to explain this pointless murder. Skin, muscle, tearing, bones separating, crushed into bits, grinding into—

He sat up in bed with a jolt. Where, where was he? Right, the hotel. Where was Kat? Right, not at the hotel. What fucking time was it? Sunset.

Christ, sunset? How long was he asleep? Must have been over ten hours. What in the ... oh fucking hell. He looked around himself, and winced as he felt the wet sheets. A cold sweat soaked the bed, and himself. His dreams hadn’t been doing that since his first change, but whatever that dream was, it scared him fucking shitless; evidence was there in front of him, whether he wanted to believe it or not. He’d probably have literally shit the bed, if it’d gotten any worse.

He got up out of bed, and headed for the shower. His feet were like cinder blocks, dragging, knocking against the door frame and the hallway. Some random, shitty hotel, so he blamed his clumsiness on that. And the weight of his body? Had to be the shitty bed. Shit bed, shit hotel, shit sleep, and now he had stubbed toes. Even if the vamps can track you, you really should sleep in your proper bed, Eric. At least then you can sleep deep and proper.

He got to the bathroom, set his hands on the tiny sink, and looked into the tiny, warped mirror. Looked like shit. Felt like shit. Everything was shit.

“What ... the fuck was that?” He held a hand up to his face, stared into the mirror, and cradled his jaw. No idea, no idea what that fucking was. The dream was vivid, blatant. His dreams often were, since the changes had started hitting him. There was usually a voice in his dreams, and it talked to him, that much he managed to wrap his mind around. But that thing, that giant fucking gargoyle thing, was not like anything else.

It found him. It ran him down in his dream, and killed him. Holy fuck, he could still remember the sensation of pain, unimaginable pain, in his bones and muscles as they started to tear to pieces. Saran wrap being pulled apart, resistant and pliable at first, before it started to give way in a bloody mess. He now knew what it felt like to die, in the most horrible way possible. What a lovely memory to have drilled into his mind for the rest of his life.

Nasty nightmare? It was unusual for a nightmare. God fucking damn, he felt like shit, like someone had run him over with a truck. He didn’t feel like someone had torn him in half; still breathing, after all. If someone had run him down though, hopped out of the truck, and beat his ass with a baseball bat, he might feel like this. Except the pain wasn’t in his body, wasn’t in his bones or muscles like it felt like it should have been, and it wasn’t real pain. Something in his brain told him he was fucked, and needed to lie the fuck down, told him he was beaten and bruised, even though he didn’t feel like it.

He stared down at the sink. Red eyes. Glowing, red eyes. Maybe a spirit, like the ones in the alley? No, those his instincts told him were spirits. They smelled like spirits; what that was, his human brain wasn’t able to put a finger on, but they did. There were spirits in his dreams, but they couldn’t have been real, just dream things spawned by whatever was clawing its way out of the depths of his subconscious to talk to him.

He looked at the mirror again. Everything turned double, and started dancing around. Colors blurred, bleeding over each other. Hallucinating? No, he knew this feeling, the same feeling of being in a choke hold. Except you were normally lying on the ring floor during one of those, not standing.

He collapsed. One of his hands managed to grab the sink basin on the way down, but he went down anyway, bodyweight jerking on the sink hard enough to half-turn his body with his shoulder as a pivot point. He almost wrenched his arm out of the socket, but let go at the last moment, other shoulder slamming into the floor.

“Fucking ... shit...” He gasped for air. For a moment, for a painfully long fucking moment, he felt like the wolf in that dream again, after he was slammed into the tree trunk. A sack of broken flesh, lying down, unable to do anything. He turned his head and stared at the crummy ceiling. It was spinning.

Breathe. Breathe. Get some air into your fucking lungs.

He forced in the air, slow and deep. His body ached, or fake ached or whatever, but it was nothing he couldn’t handle. The problem was his brain didn’t want to function, didn’t want to uptake the oxygen. Christ, was he having a stroke?

No, that made no sense. Wrong symptoms, and his new body didn’t seem like it’d ever get a stroke. Something else was happening to him. Fuck, fuck fuck fuck, what was happening to him?

He took a taxi back to his new home. Thinking he could get a better night’s rest at some random hotel backfired, apparently. No, there was no way the shitshow that was his brain right now was caused by the hotel, unless there was a gas leak in the hotel and he borderline died. Now back at his Invictus-bought penthouse suite apartment, he could catch his breath, take a shower, get dressed, and get ready for work.

Hopefully. The ride up the elevator did not go well. He was in the suit he wore the night before, and that was the only thing that got him past the concierge, considering he was dragging his hands against every surface so he didn’t fall over. It was a damn expensive place to live, and lot of the people coming and going were dressed in tuxedos or other expensive, ridiculous suits. Some women were dressed for nights at the opera, while others were dressed for high price nightclubs where they’d blow a blue collar’s monthly wages in a single night, on heroine. Everyone looked like they bled money, and at the moment, he very much did not, tripping over himself like he was dying.

Fuck, maybe he was dying. Was that dream a premonition? That gargoyle, demon, whatever the fuck it was, belonged on a god damn cathedral, casting judgment on everyone passing by. It did not belong in his head. It wasn’t supposed to be there, that much his new senses could tell him. If it didn’t belong there, the fuck did that mean?

He pressed the button on the elevator, and did his best to not look at the tiny dog sitting in a woman’s purse; dog didn’t bark, so, props to her for good training. Concrete weighed on his shoulders, and pulled him into the side of the elevator. Stay standing, just stay standing. Another person came on, older dude in a suit with a mustache, maybe visiting someone. Eric managed a small nod. Be polite to the strangers, and let everyone look at you like you’re drunk, just don’t prove it.