Author's Note: Second edit pass complete! Check out my bio for details.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
~~Beatrice~~
Beatrice had no idea Dolareido had so many dark, hidden corners.
"You Carthians. It will never cease to amaze me how much you want to adapt the modern," Jacob said.
"Modern?" The two of them were deep into North Side, and probably near the edge of the city. It was a big city; she'd never been out this far.
"That you would take a car, instead of this!" The crazy Nosferatu gave that weird chuckle of his, and jumped. With the old, dark robes he was wearing, he looked like a shadow.
They were on rooftops in the old business district, old old, back from way before Beatrice was alive. North Side had long ago turned into more a factory district, full of heavy labor workers during the day, and dead silent at night. And it meant that the two monsters could jump from rooftop to rooftop of factories, warehouses, parking garages, foundries and power plants. They had the freedom to let loose, jump from building to building like the predators they were, and even look up at the sky.
Every so often, that's exactly what they did. Jacob would hold up a hand, look up at the sky — what the fuck dude your eyes are covered with bandages how the fuck can you see — and sigh with some weird bliss. But hey, when he did, she did, and she had to admit, damn that was a nice sky. You couldn't see it in South Side, not with all the massive buildings and the constant sources of light.
"It's hard to go roof jumping when there's a hundred thousand cameras and a couple million eyes looking around," she said.
"Hard for us?"
"... no, I suppose not." It was true, of course. Any Nosferatu or Mehket could hide in shadows, and the best of them could hide in plain sight. Jacob could. She could.
She followed after him, jumping from rooftop to rooftop, like cats jumping from tree to tree. "You put your den way the fuck out here?"
"Dolareido started over a couple hundred years ago. Back then, it was just Antoinette, her lover Tony, Viktor, and me." He grinned over his shoulder at her. "Three groups. We all took a corner, and I have since made sure that my corner is... not a focus point of attention." He stopped then, and this time gave her a Joker smile. "Kind of like your Catacomb Fortress of Solitude."
She grumbled and looked away. The fucker was disturbingly pop-culture savvy, considering he was the oldest Kindred in the whole fucking city.
"Fine. Fuck you, but fine. So I've earned your trust, is that it?"
He walked toward her then, and she stood her ground. The elder Nosferatu had had multiple opportunities to kill her; that wasn't his game. So she wasn't afraid of him killing her, or at least that's what she told herself. He was a psycho, and the closer he got, the more her inner-beast told her to shut up the fuck up and run.
"Of course not." He poked her in the shoulder, and she stood there and took it. The fuck was she going to do to him? "The primogen know of the den. You can do no real harm knowing its location. And besides, I think you'll like it."
More grumbles, but she eventually gave a nod, and clicked her monstrous crocodile teeth side to side. "Fine, let's go."
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
All the way outside the city and further up North Side, they came to the mix of hard, dry forest and rock. Lots of lifeless rock. But Jacob gave her a wink, and jumped down one of the larger drops.
Holy mother fucking shit. There was a cave. An actual real cave buried in a dense bit of wood and bush, at the base of the canyon. The fall would have killed any kine, as it was pretty steep, and the landing was almost nothing but jagged rocks, but the two Kindred were able to jump down without issue. Jacob squeezed through all the twigs and sharp stone like a snake, slick and smooth; she got a thousand cuts trying to follow him. But it was worth it.
The cave was, for a good long while, just a tunnel, but after a couple minutes of pressing forward through solid black, her Kindred eyes were suddenly forced to adjust to flickering brightness.
She thought her catacomb was metal, but whatever fucking insanity Jacob had set up in the cave was beyond humbling. The tiny tunnel expanded into a massive, absolutely colossal cavern. A thousand people could have fit in it, and when she glanced around, she could see there were tunnels that lead elsewhere. The floor of the cave had been smoothed out, like a beach stone, and the walls were not only smoothed out as well, they had holes carved into them. They held skulls, and the skulls served as the base for lit candles.
All along the walls of the rounded cave, there were bones hung in symmetrical arrangements. Where someone else may have hung paintings, or splurged on fancy sidings and curtains, the cave used bones. They weren't just put at random, but arranged as artwork themselves that drew her eye to the center of the room. Skulls were the theme, naturally, and some sort of fountain altar, lined with skulls up and down its rim and sides, stood in that center.
A couple of ghouls were walking around, nothing special about them, except they had brooms and clothes and were casually cleaning.
"... did you find this?"
"No. Decades of effort were required to carve this hole." Jacob jumped across the whole of the massive room, and landed by the center altar, just opposite of her. She walked, walking was fine, but her eyes were drawn to that altar; as she approached, she could see it was filled with red liquid, thick and viscous.
On the way toward the altar, she glanced around. Many of the tunnel holes dug into the walls were actually just small rooms, some ground level and some higher, all rounded and filled with furs. And one of them had noises coming from them.
She took a peak at Jacob, but he just shrugged at her with a smirk, and looked into his bowl of blood. So she had the freedom to explore, did she? They probably figured she'd be too timid in the new surroundings, well fuck them. She walked toward the noise, got comfy in the doorway with her shoulder against the wall of stone, and folded her arms against her stomach.
"Beatrice."
"... Othello. Haven't seen you in a while." She tried to hide the shock in her voice, but it was true she hadn't seen the man in some time.
Othello was a dark-skinned fellow with delicate brown eyes, long black hair, and whoever had groomed him before embracing him had put him through a grueling training regimen. He was of average height, sure, but he was built like a tank. Steroid abuse had probably been in his history, when he was kine. He was a Daeva too, and as far as Beatrice knew, he was almost a century old, almost as old as Julias. He was one of their strongest Ancillae Kindred; he'd been a Carthian before he kinda just upped and left.
Apparently, he'd joined the Circle of the Crone. And apparently he was enjoying himself, as was the woman sitting on his lap. A curvy, short creature with clipped red hair was facing Beatrice, her back to Othello, with her legs spread and her ass grinding into his naked body. The Kindred was just sitting there, letting the girl do all the work, but judging from the noises she was making she was perfectly happy with that. The quiet Daeva's cock had spread her ass open, so the woman's cunt was on full display, and it was a mess of juices. The room smelled thick of her sex.
"Enjoying the view?" The big guy's hands reached out for the curvy little fox on his cock, and they started to drift and roam up and down her body. He made a showing of pinching her nipples, lifting her breasts by them to let them drop, jiggle a little too, before sliding down to her pussy. His fingers slipped into her cunt, and from how the girl started moaning, he was probably stroking her insides with his shaft deep in her ass.
Beatrice shook her head for a second to snap her eyes back up to Othello's; now was not the time to think about sex. But there wasn't any harm in looking, right?
"You could say I'm a little surprised. You witches just fuck like animals, all the time, no privacy?"
"We could have privacy, if we wanted," he said, "but we don't. No desire to. It's not really in the spirit of the Circle, is it?" Suddenly, the ghoul started squirming and mewling; Othello's fingers had started doing a number on her insides.
"... I suppose not." She took a peak around his room. Nothing in there except a mountain of furs to rest on, and fuck on.
More noises, but not from those two. She gave Othello a small nod, he returned it, and she moved on. She really, very much tried to not think of the girl having the anal sex with the fingering and the wriggling and the squirming and the cumming. Arg, she could smell sex, and it was making her hungry.
The next room with noises required a good thirty-foot jump to reach, but was otherwise the same, just a really large, carved-out nook in the wall of stone and bones. It was all smooth stone with a couple of skull candles in its walls, and a mountain of furs.
This time she found Jennifer. The Ventrue was only a decade embraced, a neonate, and they actually looked kind of similar with their ear-length raven hair that framed their face, average height, slightly dark skin, and slim, fighter physiques. Every time Beatrice saw her, it was a painful mirror of what she'd look like if she wasn't Nosferatu.
Jennifer's side was to the doorway, and she was laying down on her back on top of a man. And on top of her, was another man, and she had her legs spread around his hips.
"... you have got to me shitting me."
"Oh, Beatrice. Jacob said he'd be bringing you here today." Jennifer let out a quiet sigh of pleasure, and turned her head to look to the Nosferatu.
She didn't stop fucking though. In fact, the two men -- ghouls, Beatrice assumed -- just continued to fuck her and ignored Beatrice completely. Even knowing she was coming, Jennifer hadn't bothered to hold off her sexual desires until later. Everyone just went with their desires in the Circle, evidently.
"So you all really do just fuck like animals." This time she did look away, but the image was already burned into her skull. One girl, two guys, six legs, the rhythmic back and forth of three sets of hips, and Jennifer's quiet, controlled sighs.
The Ventrue just laughed, and wrapped her hands to pull the man between her legs closer. "We are animals, just at the top of the food chain. I think we're entitled to a few perks." Spoken like a true Ventrue. "Come join me. My ghouls won't mind a Nosferatu, what with Jacob terrorizing them regularly."
The two men chuckled at that, but still didn't stop. They'd buried their faces in the girl's neck at that point, and just kept gently fucking the Kindred between them. It was all so surreal, the way their limbs all just entwined on each other, their bodies on the furs. Jennifer was apparently quite comfortable with the position, and she relaxed into their bodies while her hands roamed over one of the men's back. The Ventrue angled her hips in just the right way, and raised her legs in just the right way, to keep everything moving in just a perfect pace of sexual god damn fucking beauty.
Well, Beatrice was definitely down with the Circle's approach to sex. It took everything she had to look away, but she had a boyfriend now though. Shit, now she had thoughts of Julias, naked, doing things to her.
"Um, can't, but.... I'll... uh.... talk to you later."