~~Beatrice~~
Nearing Azamel's hole in the ground, back in a place she very much didn't want to be. But this was how the magic happened, throwing yourself into the deep end and seeing if you could swim. She had Jacob with her, so at least he'd help her out if she started drowning. Hopefully. Maybe.
Azamel's place was still maybe a quarter mile ahead, and each step down the abandoned tunnel sent larger and larger chills up Triss's spine. She could feel it, her, the old woman, feel the oppression the monster radiated, like something thick in the air. Felt like trying to swim through some sort of sludge, something that made you not want to be there.
And it wasn't like that the first time she'd come here. It was there, but it wasn't like this, not like this.
It wasn't just a feeling either. The tunnel was flickering, fading in and out, and the moving shadows weren't rare anymore. They were everywhere. And to make it even creepier, they weren't always black. Sometimes, bits of purple or red sneaked into the waves of shadow, and sometimes bits of gold.
It only got worse the closer they got to Azamel's place. Sometimes the tunnel faded out, pitch blackness swallowing them, only for a brief flash of something to appear. White pillars with golden platforms circling their contours every twenty feet or so, with small lighthouse-like shapes on the top, and red drapes with gold embroidery hanging from them. And then they were gone, and the two vampires were again walking in a long, boring, abandoned subway tunnel.
Then again it flashed, back in a dream, back in some sort of madness of long stretches of green grass, trimmed, tall, weird bushes, and a river that flowed. Again, gone, replaced with dirty train tracks, concave walls of concrete brick, and the old, dusty floor around them.
Again, more flashes, except now puddles of blood lined white stone floor. Guillotines beneath a red sky, a dozen of them, each with a fresh body to bleed red into the puddles. The pools of red connected into a small, carved ravine in the white floor, and followed its twisting snake-like shape into the river, where the blood flowed away. Then they were back to the tunnel, and its curve at the end where it opened up into Azamel's home.
A big, empty room of concrete, with a stage a foot or two high off the floor. Here, Azamel had set up Grandma's place, rocking chair and shitty furniture included.
But it wasn't Grandma's place. Holy fucking shit. Beatrice gasped and stepped back as she looked up, gulping down nothing and eyes widening until her new eye started to hurt. A blood moon, literally. A giant red moon far far far too close to the planet, so big it filled half the sky. It bled red, thick, a liquid that fell upon the palace that stood before her, some sort of palace made of white stone, smooth, carved, ornate, with tall pillars surrounding it, and multiples domes on its roof topped with gold spears.
Guillotines were spread around the palace courtyard, and they bled into the twisting, turning man-made stream of red that leaked out into the river beside the palace. More than just guillotines added to the death show, but spears with corpses mounted on them, skin flayed or backs split open from what had to be a hundred strikes from a whip. And then gone again, back to the concrete, the shitty old lights that were somehow still working, and the god awful lamp plugged into an extension cord on granny's stage.
Her, sitting in her chair, rocking back and forth and smoking a cigarette, an old book in hand. Triss tried to hide her trembling.
"What are you doing here, old man?" she said.
Jacob laughed, predictably. "Pot calling kettle."
"And you have an eye. You looked better with the bandage."
"Yeah well, I couldn't see you all too well without the eye."
"See me?" Azamel coughed, coughed, and coughed a few more times until Triss was sure she'd cough up a lung. But it passed, and she tapped her slippers on the stage floor twice as she took another drag of her cig. "I had always assumed you could see without eyes."
"I can, but now, I can see you."
"You... can see me?" She leaned forward, set an elbow against the chair arm, and her chin in the palm, cigarette between her fingers. Her eyes, old, worn, stared into Jacob with a piercing gaze Triss didn't expect from an old woman.
And then the world changed around her again. The guillotines, the spears, and other devices of torture were set about, some with people still in them. Screams filled the air, and Beatrice raised her hands to cover her ears to block them out. But they were constant, rising and falling in volume like waves in a sea of torture. The palace was closer now, and the blood that poured from the moon above dripped down its shiny white walls like slime.
But now there was something in front of the palace, and Triss backed away again until she felt her butt hit the concrete behind her. An elephant? No, some sort of person with an elephant head, but from head to toe they had the skin of an elephant. Four arms, human, but each hand held a chain, and from each chain dangled something Triss did not want to see. A corpse from one. A giant net filled with fresh skulls in the other. And finally, a sword in both of the remaining hands, scimitars. They were coated in blood, and dripped of it, unending, as if they themselves were bleeding.
The size was impossible. No way, there was no fucking way something this big was real, no way it could have existed. It towered over them, fifty feet tall sitting down, with legs folded in front of it crossed at the ankle, knees apart.
She recognized that figure. She knew absolutely shit all about religions or Hinduism, but she recognized an iconic figure when she saw one, looming over her like a god ready to squash a buzzing insect.
The image faded away, replaced with the sobering world of concrete and tunnels, electricity and shitty green chair that should have been burned for its crime against eyes everywhere.
"... you can see me." Azamel blew smoke toward them, but it dispersed long before reaching them. "No, silly girl, I am not who you think I am." Another deep drag of her cig, and she shrugged as she leaned back in her shitty, creaking recliner. "I'm not even from the East."
"I... I... uh... I—"
"And I do not appreciate prying eyes!" She slammed one of her slippers down. Not a slipper, not a fucking slipper at all. As the images of the two realities overlapped, the giant elephant thing raised a leg, and slammed it against the white, bloodied stone that it sat upon.
And the world began to quake. The rivers of blood began to boil, rippling with the vibrating world, and the blood moon cried out its agony, a deep bellowing sound like a great whale speared through its side. The corpses began to moan, the heads that sat about their prostrated or pinned bodies crying out to the sky. Blood leaked from their nostrils, ears, their mouths, and their eyes. It flowed into the twisting blood river, and the edges of the small stream splashed up, over, and onto the white that surrounded Triss.
Back to the real world, back to old granny sitting in her chair, glaring at the two vampires who had the audacity to enter her shitty home.
Oh good fucking god they were going to die.
"A big girl, aren't you?" Jacob said.
Triss grabbed him by the arm and started to shake the damn bastard. "I'm sorry, did you not see the giant monster woman. Did you not see the fucking corpses? Don't piss off the giant monster woman!" she said, listening in close to whisper.
Jacob snickered, and kept his eye on the granny in the chair. "So you old bat, I have some questions for you."
She snorted, and flicked the cigarette his way. He dodged. Even a lit cigarette could be nasty painful to a vampire.
"You bring your blood magic to my home so you can pry into my world, sneak a peek at my true self, and now you have questions for me? The nerve."
"That I do. Turns out you've been busy in the time you were gone. I'd heard you'd destroyed villages before your first arrival in the city, but even after you left Dolareido, you destroyed some towns. Why oh why would a nice old lady like you do such a thing."
Poking the bear with a hot iron poker. Dead. Yeap, they were dead.
"I pursue my inheritance."
"So I heard, but you'll have to forgive me. I've no idea what that means."
"... and how did you hear that this was my goal?"
Jacob shrugged, laughed, and did a small spin in place. "My secret."
The old woman snarled, and reached into her god awful sweater vest to pull out a pack of cigarettes. Trembling hands struggled to retrieve another cancer stick, and she growled down at the package as it fought against her. But with time, one succumbed to her assault, and she set it on her lips and lit it like it was the most natural thing to her, like someone putting on their glasses that they'd been wearing for a hundred years.
It was probably Black Blood that told Jacob about this, but then how did that freak show know? And what the fuck was inheritance, if even Jacob and Black Blood didn't know what it meant?
"Mark. Get rid of these two."
Triss almost squeaked as a man stepped out from behind a four panel room divider on the stage, some shoddy piece of hazel crap that she could probably buy at a flea market for a dollar. The man looked entirely forgettable, dark skin, a bit overweight, clean shaven with short, curly hair. Some jeans and a worn out gray shirt covered what she guessed was a fair amount of muscle to go with that fair amount of fat.
