Author's Note: Second edit pass complete! Check out my bio for details.
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~~Beatrice~~
"So you'll do it?" Jacob said.
"Yeah I'll fucking do it. But if this Damien is as sneaky as you think he is, you think I can really just creep into his place and follow him around?" She clicked her teeth together.
"I know you can." Psycho-man circled around the skull alter so it was between them, and began to move his hands over the bowl of rotting old blood. "That's part of the reason I brought you, after all. You have a lot of power, strength, and that animal instinct, unlike those worthless fucking leeches." He laughed then, and started to wave his hands over the blood. "And you'll have help."
"Help?"
He nodded then, and with a motion so casual, sliced open his wrist. She winced, he cut deep, but it wasn't enough to make Jacob even blink. The dark, thick blood of a Kindred started to drip from the unnatural wound in a slow, mesmerizing flow. When it fell into the pool of old blood, it pushed away the gross mess, and overtook the bowl of blood. Eventually, the blood was renewed.
And then Jacob started to hum.
"... what the fuck are you doing?"
He held up a finger then, and gave her a quick glare that shut her right up. He was serious. Scary serious. When he looked down at the blood, the look was so solemn it made her insides clench, and it only got worse when he put his hand into the blood. He kept humming, louder, and louder, until he found the frequency to make the very cave resonate.
She took a step back, but Jacob's other hand rose, and gestured her to step closer. His joking smile was gone, and now she was standing in front of an elder. And he was bleeding his blood, his vitae right into an alter bowl of skulls in front of her. Suddenly, the bones on the cave walls didn't seem so ridiculous.
As the weight of his hums made the cave almost vibrate, she couldn't help but get drawn into the awesome but overwhelming, sinister, and horrific nature of it all. Bones, blood, bleeding, dark words that had no meaning, it all combined into a surreal array of theatrical notes. She could almost hear the chanting of naked, ancient Kindred dancing around the corpses of their kills.
Scary stories spread by fellow Carthians about Jacob and his dark arts were the things young neonates talked about. What else were freshly embraced going to do? They sat around in the dark, afraid of the elders, and talked about the unusual, disturbing things they'd heard those elders could do. There'd been talk about the Lancea et Sanctum, long gone, and their strange works of God. But the stories about Jacob were so much more visceral, because Jacob was real, and none of them knew anything about the Circle of the Crone. Stories about something they could do with blood, and magic. Something called Crúac.
And now she was here, in his dark ritual. It was Crúac. The whole cave was made as Jacob's shrine, and the altar in the center that had seemed moderately innocent at first now loomed before her like an evil god. It was a sacrifice alter, and the weight of that only now dawned on her.
What sort of fucked up shit had she gotten herself into? Her insides were howling, like wolves howling at the moon. She stepped closer to Jacob then, because her inner-beast demanded it, and she watched with wide eyes. Something called to her, something wild and animal, hungry and territorial, savage and pure. The sounds of those hums danced up and down her spine and made her whole body tingle.
When Jacob reached out to place a bloody hand against her face, she didn't even flinch, she only closed her eyes and let the elder put a hand print of his own blood on her face. And just like that, it was as if someone had injected the blood of a god straight into her withered, undead veins. She stumbled for a moment while the power worked its way up and down her legs and into her claws; it even made her teeth vibrate.
"What... wh—"
"You'll have my mastery of the cloak of night, for tonight. Use it well. I want to know everything about this Damien, and now that Lucas is back, I am sure he'll let something show."
"Your... right, right, ok. Why not do it yourself though?"
Jacob shook his head and idly scratched at the gash made in his own flesh. "I will be distracting Lucas."
She gulped. Jacob was putting a whole lot of faith in her. Why? Why not the others? The psycho bastard was going to 'distract' some other elder, while she fucking followed his childe?
It was some serious next level shit.
"I'll try."
"Ha. Might want to do better than try. You fuck up, and Lucas may just rip you to shreds." Jacob shrugged, gave a large psycho smile, and dismissed her with a wave. "I knew him, and that was fifty years before his torpor. Who knows what kind of man he is now."
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How long had it been since she'd felt so nervous? Must have been since she was turned. Back then she was just a mess of self-loathing, thrust into a fucked up world, and only Garry showed her an ounce of compassion. And Garry was a scary guy. But now? Now she was dragging her ass through the vents of Tony's old underground lair, with a Crúac bloodmagic symbol on her face giving her elder levels of badassness, so she could spy on a super dangerous elder's childe.
Nervous did not begin to describe how she felt.
Fighting on the streets, pushing around Invictus assholes treading on Carthian territory, and worrying about how she'd get her next meal were the things she was used to. Now she was neck deep in the shit. Jacob had said he knew her, that she was sick of being on the sidelines, and back then this was exactly the sort of shit she would have wanted. She had stakes in the game now and some power to go with it. She got what she wanted, but not so sure she wanted what she got.
The vents were built into the structure of the ceiling of the tunnels. How Tony had managed to get all this shit built she could not guess, but then he had centuries to work with. And Jacob knew it all. Jacob had probably arranged the entrance into the vents being built somehow too. Her life was in his palm, and she could only hope the crazy fuck knew what he was doing.
Beneath her, there were ghouls wandering around, all very new to the whole thing. They sat in the tunnels of metal walls and discussed with each other their new masters. She peaked down through grates to watch, and spotted several Kindred who walked with them. From how the conversation was going, the ghouls seemed to be the servants of the Kindred, which was typical.
What wasn't so typical was how they talked about God. Not a god, but God. Kindred serving God? The fuck kind of shit was that? Jacob had said Lucas was an Archbishop for the Lancea et Sanctum, so maybe this shit was the norm back before her time, but now it sounded like cult talk.
"Sam said that the Archbishop said that Vince is doing well! He was sent out to scare some kine into thinking the devil was haunting them, and...."
Beatrice rolled her eyes, and moved on. What a sick, twisted joke. Kindred scaring kine into being obedient little religious folk? Ugh.
Vents were not easy to move through. The movies made it seem easy, but when you don't have the proper traction of feet, and you have to be quiet, squirming and wriggling through vents is a bitch. Whatever weird blood spell Jacob had cast had definitely affected her, made her cloak of night stronger, but that didn't mean she could make a bunch of noise. Not when there were other Kindred walking around beneath her. Not when this mysterious Damien character was such a question mark.
It really was a weird thing, now that she thought about it. Jacob had only just learned about this Damien apparently, and she'd never heard about him from any other Kindred. Who the fuck was he? If he was Lucas's childe and Lucas had been in torpor for half a century, then Damien was at least fifty years old. It's not like a Kindred just hopped city to city, so Damien must have been hiding out in Dolareido for fifty years.
Jacob had said sneaky Mehket. No joke.
She continued on.
"Jonathan, you spend far too much time worrying about things beyond your control. Your purpose is clear, and the Archbishop and I will help you with any problems you may have serving in that purpose."
Archbishop and I? Jackpot. Beatrice came to a stop over one vent and peered down into the room beneath her, and found more than one Kindred gathering there. She could put her face onto the grate, nose against the metal, and as long as she trusted Jacob's blood magic, she would be able to remain hidden. Hopefully.
"Serve your sire. She will teach you how to seduce kine with but a glance, and you can feed upon them as God demands we should. You are the wolf, and they are God's sheep."
She blinked down at the one talking. So that was Damien? He seemed normal enough, with a cool haircut and half-shaved head. His voice was soft, but confident. He seemed... unremarkable. Even her inner-beast barely noticed him. He was just another Kindred.
And then he was gone. She was staring right at him, analyzing him, and then he was gone. Poof. She almost made a noise, bit her tongue, and pushed her face closer to the grate.
"I am surprised. It has been not even two weeks since Tony's death, and already scouts have come for his nesting grounds?"
He'd moved. What the fuck, the fucker had moved, and she could only barely see him in the large room, at the doorway of what looked like a tunnel.
Two other Kindred were there, and she knew these two: the bitch Jessy, and the pussy Natasha. What were the Invictus doing here? Natasha started talking then, and Beatrice could just see her and her partner's back, facing Damien. The speedy fucker must have moved to block the doorway.
Natasha said a few quiet words, and Beatrice strained to hear her. That Invictus was always quiet, and she stuttered like a scared mouse probably would have. Fuck she was infuriating.
