CW: Sex and violence.
Note: This upload is a newly edited version of the Soulsplitter serial.
Cassandra drags the man through the partially lit alley. His nose is bleeding, his hands shackled behind his back. The sound of the chains on the heavy metal shackles loudly clang against each other. He struggles pathetically against the bonds.
"Hey, get your fuckin' hands off me bitch!"
She turns and pulls him within six inches of her face, "If you don't shut the hell up you're going to attract attention."
"Why should I give a fuck lady?" He spits and it hits her cheek.
She kicks one leg out from under him, bringing him to his knees.
Cassandra growls and wipes her face with one hand. Her emerald eyes bore into his. "If you break the Veil and reveal us to the humans, you won't just be going to see the council; I'll take your fucking head off and bring it to them myself." She lifts the side of her coat, revealing her sheathed gladius, its pommel glinting in the light of the street lamps. She grips it momentarily, as if about to pull it from its covering.
The man stares back at her. He considers retorting, but instead he swallows nervously.
"Fine," he says.
She helps him stand up and walks behind him, holding his restraints and pushing him forward toward her car. It's a small black car, Honda Civic, a sleeper, 300 horsepower; good for street racing and chasing down rogue bounties; best of all it doesn't attract attention. About the only thing that makes it stand out are the tinted windows.
She opens the door to the back seat and tosses him in. Pulls out her radio and says, "Copperhead come in, I've acquired the package, over."
She waits for what feels like too long. It's almost twelve at night, sunlight is in six hours and she needs to hand over the bounty or he'll be ash. Fortunately, because of the tinted windows she's got a couple hours more give or take, but she'd rather not fuck around with it and find out.
"Hey lady, if you speak up for me at the council I've got some info you might want."
She ignores him.
Copperhead quickly replies, "Copy that hot mama. Location? Over."
"The old Jameson lumber mill by the railroad tracks. Come retrieve the package. Over."
"Wilco hot mama, be at your location in ten. Over." Cassandra opens her car door and tosses the radio on her dashboard. She walks around to the side of the car to address the punk.
"I don't speak up for loser little vamps like yourself. So you can save it for the council."
She slams the door in his face, silencing any possible rebuttals.
Out of the corner of her eye, she sees a person wearing a skull bandana covering the lower half of their face. They're attaching a poster to a telephone pole. Their jacket has the telltale patch with a blood-filled chalice, written below it is "In sanguine veritas."
"Fucking cultists." Cassandra swiftly opens her car door, retrieving several wooden stakes and placing them into the loops on her belt.
She goes back down the alley, doing a wall run up to a small ledge. She hops up and grabs the edge of the roof, pulling herself up in one quick tug. She rights herself on the gravel of the roof, brushing herself off quickly.
She silently runs, jumping rooftop to rooftop, over towards the building where she last spotted the person. She looks down from the edge of the building, seeing the person still standing there. The pupils narrow into vertical slits, widening in the darkness to aid her vision. In daylight her irises would be but a small ring around her pupil.
She books it past where the person is going, then quickly jumps to a ledge and then onto the ground in front of them. Her knees bending to absorb the harsh impact of hard concrete.
The person turns to her, but they aren't able to react quickly enough. Cassandra shoves them up against a car door.
"What do you know about the True Blood Coven?"
The person gives a hiss. "More than you, Cassandra."
"Excuse me?" She's only been here less than a month, how would someone already know her? It isn't as though she's particularly well-known. "How the fuck do you know my name?"
"We have history. Or have you forgotten the sound of my voice already?" The woman leans in and whispers into her ear, "You were my first after all."
Cassandra's brain is flying into all the possible directions of who this could be. Out of all the people she's fucked, it could very well be anyone.
Cassandra grabs her by the coat and swings her around, following up with a kick to the woman's chest.
The woman reacts to the kick with a low sound like she's had the air knocked out of her lungs. It barely phases her though. "Sweetheart, you're really not going to fight me are you?" The woman says mockingly.
Cassandra snarls, "You people break The Veil and expose us to humans. You're going to get our species eradicated."
"No, we want to free our species from the darkness. We want to live as a sovereign independent country, and we deserve to."
Cassandra feels a surge of anger. "Are you insane? Humans will never accept us. You've seen how they treat their own kind, you think they won't do the same to us?"
She runs towards the mysterious woman, holding a stake in one hand.
They trade blows, Cassandra much less sloppy. With each hit, she feels the fatigue of the last fight with the punk boy.
Cassandra lands a couple solid hits to the side of the woman's face; blood stains her bandana, seeping through it. She grabs her in a hold around her neck, striking her repeatedly in the head. Each hit reverberates through her arm with a loud cracking sound.
The unknown woman escapes the hold, but she's swaying on her feet. She pushes Cassandra back against the wall of a shop. Cassandra grapples her by the shoulders and switches their places, slamming the masked attacker into the side of the brick wall. She winds up to impale the stake into the woman's heart, but the woman deflects it with her arm; it veers off target and pierces through the woman's shoulder.
The woman screams, loud enough that dogs start barking and birds fly away.
The mysterious woman drops her mask in an instant and kisses Cassandra with bloodied lips. It comes so fast Cassandra doesn't see the woman's face. Then she's assailed by the woman's claws repeatedly stabbing into her chest.
Cassandra staggers backwards, blood gushing from her wounds. She's stunned from the kiss, and disoriented from the pain; her vision not quite focusing properly.
She sees the woman close in on her, bandana back up, a bloodied stake in one hand.
Time slows for a moment, and Cassandra tries to reach up to deflect. But she's too tired, and distracted from the pain. She feels the excruciatingly hot electric stab of carved ironwood in her chest.
All of the energy is sapped from her. Cassandra's legs fail and she drops to her knees. Out of seemingly nowhere, there's a sword up against her neck. She's grasping madly at the stake in her chest, but it's slick with her blood.
"I could kill you." The woman lowers the sword, "But I won't."
She reaches over and trails a bloody claw across Cassandra's cheek gingerly.
"Later." The woman sheathes her sword and walks off down the street.
Cassandra tries to grab the stake. To take it and pull it out. She finally manages to grip it and tries to pull. But she isn't strong enough, she's too weak from the stake having stopped her heart. Her legs finally give out and she topples over.
She coughs up blood from her serrated lungs. "Where the fuck is Eoin at?"
The world begins to fade. Pinpricks encroach into her perfect vision, turning bright white; while blackness shades her peripherals. Then she's plunged into a comfortable, warm void of unknowing.
Cassandra awakens to someone tapping her face and saying things she can't understand.
Her every instinct screams that the stake shouldn't be in there. To remove the stake as fast as she can. The pain blooms again in her chest, taking up her entire world.
A guy, barely in his twenties crouches in front of her. She can just make out his medium-length dark hair framing his face.
"Jesus Christ, how are you still alive?"
Cassandra yells in pain, her husky voice echoing through the empty streets.
"Pull... it out. Pull it out. Pullitout!" Cassandra panics, trying to grasp at it, her arms flailing, slipping from the blood coating the wood.
The pain isn't just bad. It's worse than before she passed out. But she can take it. The problem is that if she doesn't remove the stake she won't heal, and she's currently bleeding out slowly but steadily.
"Stop, stop. You're going to bleed out if you do." He's using his shirt to try to sop up the blood from around her stomach wounds. "I need to call an ambulance."
Cassandra manages to move her arm to grab his, "Don't. Just take it out. It's in my fucking heart. Trust me it couldn't be any worse than it is."
"O-Okay. I'm A-Alex, what's your name?"
"Cassandra," she growls out.
"Alright, you're going to be okay. I guess... I'll just pull this out?"
Alex puts his hands around the stake, and he stares at it as though as though the stake shouldn't be in a living woman's heart.
"Please," Cassandra pleads with him.
He tries at first, but his hands slip off of the stake since it's covered in blood.
Alex takes off his button-up shirt and wraps it around the stake, then pulls as hard as he can.
The sharp, narrow piece of wood comes out with a squelch.
Cassandra lets out a huge groan of relief.
The pain is fading rapidly. She focuses her energy, sending it to her heart to piece it back together faster.
The wounds on her chest all start to close up and turn into small white scars, before vanishing as if they weren't even there before.
"You're alive?" Alex looks closely at her, "Wait, how are you healing?" He examines the various claw stab marks on her chest. His expression is pure confusion and bewilderment.
"Fuck me sideways... It never gets any better no matter how many times you get staked."
