Chapter 54

~~Jack~~

Alone, in the old, abandoned tunnels, and soon to enter Azamel’s hole in the ground. He didn’t want to be here, but it was important, too important.

With the Invictus, meeting the elders was an imposing affair of big leather chairs and long hallways. With the Uratha, meeting Avery was as cozy as sitting down on a couch, next to a bomb. With Azamel, meeting her was like walking through a tunnel into some sort of nightmare realm — probably was — and talking with the monster under the bed. They were monsters, she was a monster, and the feeling in his gut told him he was going to be speaking with something akin to a clown demon, whispering to him from a gutter drain in the street.

Prickly, crawly things, invisible but there, tickled along his skin as he got closer and closer to where Azamel lived. The lights were flickering, but on, some of them at least, and they made a buzzing noise as they struggled to remain lit. Quiet screams echoed along the concrete bricks of the concave walls of the tunnel, so quiet he was sure his imagination was being a giant asshole and making things worse than they actually were. But the fact Azamel was a genuine monster, a thing of legend, a fucking nightmare, casted doubt on whether it was his mind playing tricks on him.

The Invictus knew he was here. He hadn’t told them, but they knew, they had to. They’d set up explosives, so no doubt they had cameras watching those to some extent or another. Hell, even without the explosives, Invictus used technology like a weapon; there’d be cameras all over the city they could either tap into, or had set up themselves. And since everyone had seen him talk to Athalia at the party, no doubt his bosses could piece together why he was here, and that it was requested he not talk to them about it, lest the encounter be canceled and all hell break loose.

Why couldn’t old demons use e-mail, or texts?

He shivered and rubbed his arms. Dressed in a good suit, the sort he’d wear to an official meeting with the Invictus, hoping to make a good impression. It was probably wasted. Still, he adjusted his tie, rubbed his buzzed hair a few times, and stepped into Azamel’s home. A vivid imagination painted for him a merry picture, lots of ways he could die down here, probably while having a private conversation with a monster out of a Stephen King novel.

But she wasn’t there.

He stopped at the stage, where the old woman kept her furniture, and raised a brow as he looked around. The lights were on, including a god-awful lamp on the stage, but no one was home.

“ ... hello?” he said. His voice echoed against the concrete walls. No one. Maybe—

“This way.”

He jumped. Oh good fucking god it someone’s voice, a whisper, like ice on his neck. He turned around, but no one was there. It could have been a vampire, someone using their cloak of night, someone who was enough of a master to both hide themselves in it, but also let their voice out? No, no fucking way, vampires didn’t feel like this, like needles stabbing him up and down his body.

But the voice did come from a direction, and, gulping down on nothing, he headed toward the sound. It was coming from down the other tunnel, where none of the lights worked.

“This way...”

Dead, so dead, so fucking dead. He hadn’t even seen anything yet, and he could feel that panic crawling up his legs and down his spine. Like someone with a needle and balloon beside his head, ready to pop it at any moment, he could feel his muscles tense and his teeth clench until they were grinding. Weight shifted onto the balls of his feet, and his fingers clenched at his sides. It hadn’t been nearly this bad last time he was here, but last time Triss was with him, and Azamel had simply been on the stage, rocking back and forth in her chair. This time he was alone, and everything felt different.

He stepped into the tunnel, but managed only ten feet before he noticed the floor of the tunnel gave way into a stairway.

A stairway? What the fuck. Where there should have been subway tracks and concrete, instead, a large square hole was the subway floor instead, thin and long, like the sort you found under cellar doors leading into basements. And, with the hole into hell only a few feet in front of him, he could more clearly hear the screams. The tunnel past the stairway wasn’t there anymore, blocked off by a giant wall of tattered and cracked concrete instead. That wasn’t supposed to be there either.

“Down ... here ... Jack,” the voice said, mixed in with the howls and shrieks.

Yeah, if there was one way he was going to die, it was right down this stairway. A clown was going to jump out at any moment, and rip the soul right out of his fucking body. The fuck kind of vampire was scared of the things in the dark? He fucking was.

Again, he gulped on nothing, and took a step down. His shoes clacked on stone, heavy stone, the soft thud ringing down into the stairway. Just like walking into a basement, right? Walking into a basement filled with cries of what must have been torture. And, he couldn’t see anything past ten feet, endless black awaiting him with its gaping maw.

“And if you gaze long enough into an abyss, the abyss also gazes into you,” he said, a whisper too quiet for himself to hear. Butchering a quote and dropping half its meaning, but, he was a product of his generation, after all, internet snippets and a short attention span.

He pulled out his smartphone, and shined the light into the stairway. It added a whole six inches onto how far he could see. The darkness wasn’t a lack of light, not wholly, but a fog, a black fog that tugged at his fingers as his held the phone light out. Cold. He yanked his phone back, and winced as he took a step into the obsidian shroud, so its icy embrace swallowed him. With one hand still holding the useless phone for its buried light, the other reached out to the stairway beside him for balance, and he began the descent.

“You idiot Invictus think you can control us, control nightmares themselves, with explosives.” The cold voice matched the icy fog and unending obsidian like a creepy laugh fit a clown. God damn it, stop picturing clowns with psycho eyes. There are no clowns!

“ ... Athalia?” He kept walking. The stairway kept going down, and down, and down, each step echoing the soft clack of his shoes down into the depths. Stone above him, stone beside him, stone below him. The light of his phone was enough for him to see the ones directly near him, but all that got him was a glimpse of old, worn, black and gray rock, blurred by the icy fog of death.

“Keep walking, little leech.”

Yeap, definitely Athalia. That alleviated his fear, a little. He knew Athalia, seen her injured back in the tunnel when he first met her, then later at the ball, surrounded by sex. A person, a woman, who got up and walked around and ate breakfast.

It didn’t feel like that, not this time. As that icy voiced floated through the black, it felt more like the time he was lost in a sewer once when he was a child, one of those walk-in water tunnels on the edge of town. Endless black. He was only four at the time, and when he was older, he realized it was a very small tunnel with only a few forks that were all dead ends, none in use. Perfectly safe. At the time, in the nigh pitch black, the chill had scared and scarred him to the bone; thought for sure something was in the dark chasing him. It was years before he could walk past a dark room without hurrying past, hoping to dodge whatever nightmarish arm would reach out from the shadows to yank him into the death onyx.

It felt fucking just like that.

“Athalia, come on, I’m—”

“I. Said. Walk!” The darkness shook around him, vibrations quaking and tearing the air asunder, like glass shattering over his head. The voice lost its whisper, and became an ear-splitting shriek, knocking him onto his ass against the hard stone.

Further down the stairway, he could see movement. Twitchy movement, something jerking to the side, then to the other side of the thin stairway tunnel, something white. Then it was gone. He reached out for the wall, hands shaking, slipping on the stone as if it was slippery. But, it wasn’t slippery, it was his fingers refusing to hold still, unable to stop trembling as he tried to brace his weight against it. He almost fell over again, but, forced his knees to stop wobbling. It was a stairway of stone, steep, and if he started falling down it, he probably wouldn’t stop until he reached the bottom, and broke every bone on the way.

The weird, white thing in the distance flickered again, then faded into the black, gone. He walked after it, like a moth chasing a light in the darkness. What was that Metallica line? The soothing light at the end of your tunnel, was just a freight train coming your way.

“You ... you trying to scare me for a reason? Cause, I mean, it’s working, but I thought we were supposed to be working together,” he said. Silence greeted him. “Athalia?” Nothing.

Yeah, successfully terrified. He pointed the phone down as best he could, enough so he could see his shoes reach each step, and stared on into the darkness that swallowed him. It never ended, just kept going down, and down, and down, dragging him deeper into some ridiculous metaphor for hell. Did he find himself in a David Lynch film? Or maybe he was in 1990’s Jacob’s Ladder, and this was all in his mind, cause he was fucking dying and the afterlife was greeting him with a very, very, very deep grave.

He kept walking. Down. And down. And down. Endless, fucking endless, for thirty minutes he kept walking into the black, the engulfing obsidian, until he felt dampness in the air, on his skin, in his lungs; couldn’t stop himself from panicked breathing, despite the lack of need. Down, and down, until he felt the pressure of depth in his ears threaten to pop his brain. But still, the stairway went on, and because he was an idiot, he kept walking.

Finally, floor, and not stairs. He almost tripped when he found it, foot slamming into the floor of dark stone when he expected to be going down another stair. It was a room, the black fog not as thick, enough for his light to almost reach the walls, exposing what looked like small bumps along their surface. The room was maybe twenty feet long and wide? He stepped forward a little further, and then stepped backward.

Death was waiting for him.

Slowly, turning around with all the urgency of a mountain, black wings drifted across his path and before him. Two glowing white dots hovered in the distance, eyes in the black, but the face that held them was still hidden by the black mist. But it came closer, and closer, and when he kept thinking it’d have reached him, that the two white, glowing eyes were normal human-sized eyes, they kept getting closer. Like seeing something in the distance, but thinking it was closer and smaller, the two white dots came closer and closer again, until he realized how huge the face was. A skull, with dark skin, gaunt skin to the point of skeleton-like features.

He fell back, on his ass, and gasped. It was its eyes that he’d seen when he was on the stairs earlier.

“You deserve a taste,” it said, she said, “of a nightmare.”

“M-Me? The fuck did I do?” Natasha had told him about Athalia, what her form looked like, a form Tash had gotten a peek of when Athalia got in her way, that time Tash and her two werewolf friends were looking for the spider monster. But the description didn’t do it justice, this giant skeleton torso with enormous black wings. Worse, she blended into the black fog, so he couldn’t really see any of her limbs, any defining features other than the white eyes a few feet in front of him. Any movement she made was a ghost on the still air.

The screams had stopped. At some point, they’d faded away on his journey into Hell. Where the fuck, why and how would a chorus of death cries vanish?

There was more movement in the room than Athalia. He blinked, panicking, trying to see. His eyes had trouble focusing on anything in the dark, but he tried again with his phone, hoping maybe a sliver more of the light would reach the walls.

He wished it hadn’t. Subtle reflections caught on eyes, tear-filled eyes. Dozens of them. There were faces on the walls, staring at him, each twisting and turning their heads as much as they could, but their heads were only half emerged from the blackness of the barrier. Thick thread the color of rotted skin cut in criss-crosses along where their faces emerged from the wall, stitching them into it like they’d been grafted there, bleeding skin struggling against the strands. Their faces were all the color of char, their eyes crying clear tears down the black skin, with red irises. Not red like Antoinette’s, which were a step closer to amber, beautiful and alluring. No, these faces on the walls had irises like blood. He almost expected them to cry tears of crimson, but the torn skin on their necks, temples, scalp, wherever the thread was, did plenty to keep blood trickling down the walls and onto the faces below them instead.

The faces were trying to speak, but like their heads, their lips were sealed with thread as well. Mouths tried to pull apart, obsidian skin tore, and thick red droplets fell down their chins. They were dead silent, despite the tears, the blood, despite their desperate attempts to cry out to Jack; he could see it in their eyes.

It isn’t real, it isn’t real, it isn’t real.

He looked down. The floor was stone, black, but as he stared at it, he started to notice more lines in the subtle bumps. The stones he’d been walking on, hard and rock, were shaped like body parts. Too damn hard to see in the black on the stairs, with the dark fog blocking much of his light, but now, he could see knuckles, elbows, arms and legs, all piled over each other and compressed down to create a flat surface, small bumps and grooves where hard bone would be. Like he was walking on a stairway and floor paved with corpses.

“You don’t respect us,” she said, hovering backward a few feet, so all he could see was the two glowing dots in the eye sockets of her huge skull-like head. “You ask me to stop hating you, your kind, when it is your kind that treats us as second-class citizens of the night. And yet, it is you vampires who are fragile things.”

This whole conversation felt weird. Talking to a giant floating torso of what looked like black bones, black spikes and claws, black wings, and a dangling spinal cord, was terrifying in and of itself. But, it wasn’t that he was talking to some sort of death-monster incarnate that was weird, it was the words Athalia was using. She was trying to manipulate the conversation, lead him into a corner maybe, get him to trip over words.

He’d be fine with that, and fully capable of dancing around that sort of conversation, playing the game and all, but it was hard to talk and not have a quivering lip as he stared at the monster. Felt like that time he was dealing with a giant spider monster thing, something his mind was sure didn’t exist, and yet his eyes were telling him it was.

“ ... you’re right.”

Athalia turned to him again, and came closer. Her bone hands walked on the floor, acting as her legs, and her spinal cord dragged along the stone, ceiling too high for her to float much.

“Explain.”

“W-Well, I mean, just looking at you, I doubt any neonate or ancilla vamp could handle you in a fight, especially ... in here.” He gestured to what might as well have been Hell’s basement.

“ ... yes, that is true.”

“We die if we catch a sunrise. We sleep half the day. We light up like kindling. You’re right, we are fragile...” He got up, dusted off his knees and ass, and adjusted his tie again. “You could probably handle ten, or twenty of us in a fight, in here.”

“ ... I could.”

“And yet, you’ve requested I come here, so we can talk, and find a way to work together.”

“Azamel has requested you. I just delivered the message.”

“Athalia, face it. Kindred may be weaker than your kind, weaker than Uratha too, with only our few elders as a real threat, but we’re very, very good at what we do.”

“ ... and that would be?” If skulls could frown, he was sure Athalia’s gaze would be fury incarnate. But, instead, she could only stare at him; it was enough, and he stepped back a couple times as the two glowing dots in the center of her large eye sockets bore a hole through his sternum.

“Living in cities with the people, controlling them, manipulating them, hiding among them. And by doing that, with decades, we can turn cities into havens for our kind. Not just our kind, but your kind too.” He gestured to her, open palm up, extending the metaphorical olive branch. Or handing her a sandwich, depending on the metaphor. “How often do Begotten manage to turn a food source into a home, with a support structure?”

The monster snarled, and black mist flowed out of her mouth, over her exposed, dark teeth and gaunt lips.

“We—”

A door opened, creaking, heavy, stone grinding on stone.

“Rarely, very rarely do Begotten ever find equilibrium with their food source.” Another voice, another he didn’t recognize, one with some rasp to it, and some depth as well. A lot better than the banshee shrieks and death whispers of Athalia; damn thing’s voice was like ice in his skull.

As the door opened, the black mist faded away, or at least dispersed a bit, some of it flowing into the new exit and vanishing into the new source of air.

“Athalia,” the voice said, “you were supposed to let him through.”

“I wanted to talk to him ... and ask him about Angela.”

Angela, psycho hunter woman with the glass eye?

“She nearly killed me,” he said as he followed Athalia. How she’d fit through the small door in the weird room, he had no—oh, she phased through it, body turning into black mist and moving through the door like a gaseous blob. Yeah, the sort of monster who could sneak her way into a closed off room through the cracks under the door. That’s ok, he didn’t need to sleep later or anything anyway.

He stepped out into Dolareido.

“Wait ... the fuck?” He looked around, down at himself, and froze. Blood was raining on him.

“Hello Jack,” the raspy voice said, with an accent he couldn’t recognize. But he recognized her, sort of, as she stood before him, waiting.

“ ... Fiona?”

“Indeed.”

Gone was the Scottish accent, and gone was the bubbly champagne of her voice and body language. Instead, a woman hovered before him, a woman with no eyes, giant black spikes like horns curling backward over her head like hair, serrated and covered in little spikes, two of them coming from where eyes should have been before curving back over her forehead to join the others. Skin the color of dark steel, and instead of feet, she had long shins that came into knife-like points. At least she had a mouth and nose, lips a darker tint, thin, and her chin sharp. It looked like she was hovering in the air at first, but as he took in the sight of her, he recognized the spider legs coming out of her back, massive, long, each blade-like and similar to her feet; they were holding her a few feet above the pavement. He’d seen those, back when Fiona had helped him in the tunnel with the spider monster.

No wonder the wolves thought she might have been an Azlu or whatever, she was a spider monster. Except unlike that gross abomination, Fiona’s monster form was strangely beautiful, wearing a white silk — spider silk? — dress that hugged tight to her curvy, curvy, curvy body. Holy crap she barely had a waist, and her breasts were massive, bigger than Fiona’s human breasts. Nearly as big as Antoinette’s, and considering the blood rain was soaking the dress, he could see the nipples, and—for the love of god, stop staring at the spider monster’s enormous breasts.

Once he managed to tear his eyes away, he looked beside him. Athalia reformed, black mist coalescing into bones, wings, and spikes. And without a ceiling over her head, she spread her black wings and hovered higher into the air, without bothering to use them. The blood rain mixed into the black mist that dripped from her dark bones, same as it did to Fiona and him.

“I ... recognize this city,” he said. The three of them were stepping out of a dark alleyway, an alley he walked past on the way to Elysium usually. Sure enough, once they were out on the street, he recognized the buildings. Except... “What the fuck.” The buildings, their signs, normally a subdued Las Vegas, looked warped, strange, like they were melting. They weren’t melting, as far as he could tell, but the blood rain made it look like that, as if they were being destroyed by the flood of crimson that fell upon them.

None of that compared to the fact the moon in the sky was red; and really fucking close. If he’d had a plane, he could fly into it. And to make it all perfectly terrifying, the red moon was dripping blood, oozing it down onto the city, almost as if something had wounded a god in the heavens.

Athalia hovered to his right, drifting over cars and the people inside them. People on the streets. People in the cafes and pizza joints. People in the bars. Not a one of them moved, all holding perfectly still, all ... all ... actual statues, made of stone. He approached the ones on the sidewalk, and touched one in the shoulder, some older man with a belly, in a trench coat. Stone.

“A nightmare,” Athalia said, whispering voice cutting through the rain. “I found this chamber, many years ago, a good example of the horrors your kind have inflicted on someone, someone who felt fear, someone bathed in it. It scarred the Primordial Dream, forever a nightmare. Fiona found it as well.”

“W-Wait, we did this?”

Fiona shook her head, massive array of glorious, horrifying horns of black turning with it. “Not directly. Someone, probably human, must have ... glimpsed, the sort of world Kindred have here, and saw something they probably shouldn’t have. Something that terrified them to their soul.” Fiona raised herself higher, walking on four of the massive, segmented blades that served as spider legs, while the other four reached out to poke against and balance on nearby buildings, street lamps, and cars. “It isn’t only us Begotten that can be monsters.”

Athalia snorted, a strange sound considering her voice was nothing but loud whispers, like a howling wind given the ability to speak.

“I uh ... um ... so, I’m in a nightmare?” He stared up at the blood moon as he walked along with the two monsters. Trying to be prim and proper, all business and such, wasn’t going to work anymore since he was soaked to the bone in blood. And despite himself, he licked his lips to taste it. Tasted ... weird ... and wrong, and provided no filling sensation, no tingling warmth in the core. But at the same time, it did fill him with something else, a colder sensation with stings of pain, like swallowing frozen thumbtacks. Yeah, don’t do that anymore.

“You are,” Fiona said. “The lair, our lair. The Begotten of Dolareido share this chamber.”

In a nightmare, a literal, actual nightmare. A real place, in a dream world, that was apparently a real thing too. Fiona had told him all these things, but words were meaningless compared to the sights he was seeing, to the nightmare fuel before him. A giant, red, bleeding moon, titanic drops of red falling like a waterfall onto some of the larger buildings, while other globs turned into misty red above, becoming rain. The more disturbing part was the people, the cold, dead, stone people, their empty gazes, and how the blood running down their heads looked like tears on their cheeks.

He looked at Fiona, her large ass wrapped tight in the partly see-through, white silk dress, and then looked at Athalia, the bones and black wings and dangling spinal cord, a hovering torso. Couldn’t be more different, and yet, he could see how Fiona would be the more deadly monster. Damien said she lured men in to her, abusive men, and she punished them for being lowlifes, before killing them, a regular black widow; or at least she used to kill them. He wasn’t sure how she was feeding anymore, but he hadn’t seen any reports about strange, butchery murders since then.

Athalia’s nightmarish form was far more chilling, far more direct, far more ‘the thing in your closet’ sort of horror. Or maybe, the thing in the tomb, in the old mausoleum, in the empty grave, the thing that would snap out from the darkness and drag you screaming into the dirt and bones beneath. Both were horrors of darkness, both were terrifying in their own way. And both were escorting him down a street in a literal nightmare.

He shivered.

“I can taste your fear,” Athalia said, voice slithering across the blood drops and into his ear.

He swatted away the sound, and frowned at the colossal entity. “Where are we going?”

“To speak with Azamel,” Fiona said.

“I got the impression Athalia here wanted to talk about Angela.”

The reaper monster drifted head of them, and began to hover backward a few feet above the bloody street, eyes locked onto Jack. “I suppose you must know by now. Jeremiah said it, so Beatrice heard it, and I assume she would tell Julias, and you. I ... wanted to ask ... how is my daughter?”

He stopped, and stared at the skeleton, at her giant skull, at the glowing white dots within. Hard to remember the actual woman’s face, Athalia’s face, when he was looking at the reaper version, but he managed, after a while. The dark skin and black hair, the soft face, and the steel eyes. Just like Angela.

“ ... she’s your daughter?”

Sucking in a breath through her teeth, Fiona stepped to the side, her spider legs drifting her some five or six feet away from him; predicting an argument, no doubt. If Angela was Athalia’s daughter, yeah, an argument was likely.

“She is.”

“That ... psychopath, is your daughter?”

Predictably, the reaper monster snorted again, the harsh whisper cracking the soaked air.

“She isn’t a—”

“I was bound.” He marched up to the giant skeleton, up to the skull nearly half the size of his body, and poked the floating monster in her giant sternum. “Tied to a chair. Your psychopath daughter put a blowtorch up to my fucking lips.” He jammed his finger into the monster hard enough to make her hover back a few inches. “That maniac hit me, and hit me, and hit me.”

“She—”

“Fuck you! Your daughter cut me, shot me, laughed at my misery, taunted me. She treated her fellow hunters like cannon fodder. I’m glad she’s dead, I’m glad she—”

“She’s not dead.”

He stepped back from the reaper, and stared at her as hard as he could. Maybe, just maybe, if he thought about it really hard, wished for it really hard, she’d explode. No such luck.

“She’s not dead?”

“I would know if my daughter was dead, and I know that she is not.”

“She was stabbed! She got hit by a car!”

“ ... injured then, but not dead.”

Fuck. Shitting fucking shit!

“She ... she hated me, Athalia, hated me like ... like you hates vamps but a thousand times worse.” He lowered his gaze to the bloody street, and tried his best to keep calm. Again, no such luck, and his arms started to tremble slightly as the memories of being captured, tied up, stabbed, punched, shot, burned, all slammed into his mind with the grace of a nuke.

The reaper monster sighed, black mist flowing out of her skull mouth, before dispersing on the bloody street around his feet.

“I am surprised your Invictus council did not tell you, if Beatrice did not. I’m sure they know.”

“I haven’t had the opportunity to meet with them yet, none of them, not really. We’re ... they’re ... giving me a vacation.”

Fiona drifted back toward him, and lowered herself down until she was beside him. Much as he barely recognized her, it was Fiona, someone he’d hung out with on several occasions, someone who had helped him look for Natasha. A new friend. He let the monster slip her strange hand, two large claws for fingers, and one large claw for a thumb, around his shoulder. And with her enormous spider legs still holding her sharp feet an inch above the pavement, she started to walk forward, nudging him along with her.

“I only learned a few days ago, myself,” the spider monster said, “about Angela, and Athalia.”

“Fiona, he’s not going to—”

“Athalia, you underestimate vampires, and you underestimate Jack. Even after his escape from those hunters, you underestimate him.”

How Fiona knew about Jack’s encounter with Angela, or any of the details, he didn’t know. But then both she and Athalia were monsters of darkness, according to her, and they lived and breathed shadow as well as any Nosferatu or Mekhet, or better than. They probably got their hands on the information in ways his superiors wouldn’t appreciate. But, that was fine, and he sighed as he looked at the woman beside him. Those massive black horns coiling back over her head, from her eyes, from her scalp, looked almost like hair.

“I ... didn’t come here to talk about that night,” he said.

“It deserves to be talked about.” Fiona rubbed his head a few times, not unlike how Antoinette would have, though she was only average height in her spider form, other than the extra legs. And the feel of her black claws on his head was strange, but welcome. “I know you came here to talk with Azamel, but she knows we’re talking to you first. She’ll understand if we spend a moment talking.”