Monroe Carter, whose name rhymes with martyr, was a cold-forged steel torch in the night, beaten and unyielding against an icy anvil. She'd stood against the worst of her kind, and varieties of nightmarish Damned, and every time she'd come out on top.
Only two sorts of storm could dim her amber-bright unflame, or bring her down from her roost overseeing the chaotic seethe of her Revolution...one of those was the morose downpour of heartbreak, which fortunately she'd been spared as of late.
The other was the whipping, lashing squall of failure.
She wasn't sure which was a less tolerable scourge, but one thing was certain: failure, in this game played by the All Night Society, was a storm that threatened to tear the very floor and foundations of all her work out from under her feet. As the Syndicate's members billowed and raged at her under the crackling lights that illuminated the old Canton-Mills Union House, long since abandoned to vagrants and now the thirsty Dead, let it buffet her in stoic stride.
The Beast prowling in her heart's cage was terrified, and to listen to its primitive, stupid impulses would set this house of fangs tumbling around her in stabbing chaos.
" - had no idea what you were going up against Carter, you could have sent one of us after it to get a good look - "
I couldn't have done that Corra, because my best spy is already tailing Silent Yan and I can't break his cover. She's gotten too close to us.
" - only took three members with you?! Ten of us could have taken it, twenty, but now Will is dead because of YOU - "
That wouldn't have worked, Manny, it escaped us faster than we could pursue when I brought more than three. It's cunning.
" - was my best friend, how could you?! William wasn't a soldier but you used him like one and now and this is all that remains?! Why Carter?!"
Because, the rest of you are even less effective as soldiers...you're not hunters, you're not warriors, this was the best I could do.
All the while, in the back of the hall, drooping like a bedraggled kitten dragged in from the rain, Little Samara watched her with apologetic eyes. Downcast, her shoulders slumped, the teenaged Vampire kept mouthing the words
I'm sorry, I'm sorry
as if that would change anything; it didn't alter the duty Monroe had to every member of the Syndicate. It wasn't Sam's fault.
The blame rested entirely upon her shoulders, and she deserved this public castigation. Monroe forced herself to take them in, all of them individually. Of the thirty or so members of the Syndicate who'd gathered here tonight, they were closer to twenty nine than they had been in months, for William had met Final Death and Vorath was missing his left arm - perhaps forever. Corra, at the least, had come away from their failed monster hunt unscathed but even her perfectly groomed, statuesque figure seemed curled inward...disturbed by the traumatic brush with Final Death.
In her palms, she held William's fangs, the only thing that remained after their encounter with the Shrike. The memory played beneath the icy mirror of her consciousness, like a horror movie spread across the surface of a frozen pond and she forced herself to stare outward rather than confront it all again.
She knew what she had to say; Monroe Carter just wasn't sure if she could weather what came next. "I have failed. I have
failed
," she repeated in a voice loud enough to quell them, the looming quality of her presence far taller than her 5'4". The admission was not one that was often made even privately between Kindred, let alone before a covenant; that set them looking at each other, as if questioning whether they'd really heard those three words.
"I did not know the thing we were hunting, and I chased it down with a hope for a quick resolution...for is that not how I have attended to every single petition you have placed before me?" she reminded them, thinking quickly before resistance to her self-admonishment could build among the turmoil of their linked, undead psyches.
"Sherman," Monroe leaned into the crowd standing in front of her bare, Spartan lectern, closing her fingers around the fangs in her palm stabbing into her cold flesh, "when the
Prinz
went down, how long before I swam down there myself and pried you out?"
The massive Gangrel's drawn lips tightened beneath the scraggle of his beard, crossing his pillar-dense arms over his broad, pallid chest. "She went down at o-nine hundred and thirty two, you had me out before midnight," he acquiesced with a bass rumble.
Her amber gaze raked across the room, quickly choosing her next victory from the little catalog she'd indexed in her mind, for just such an occasion where she needed to remind them that they carried on through the nights thanks to her interventions.
"Harlowe," she called out to the bent, miserable looking old man standing near Nettletongue, peevishly grimacing at her, "when the See came calling for you to answer for your apostasy, what were they met by?"
That scowl drifted slowly away like smoke in a breeze, rubbing at the snub of his nose with a yellow rubber work glove. "You, and half the Syndicate, daring the Carnifex to try somethin'."
"And did he?" Monroe pressed.
"...he turned tail, ain't never came back."
Carter reverently set William's fangs upon the lectern and straightened with a prideful stare, challenging those who'd followed her this far. "When you all called for me to protect you from Final Death, to guard your secrets, and to avenge your fallen, I awakened my Sire and drained her heart's blood to inscribe our laws. I pressed the paper myself from Morgan Keirow's ashes."
All of these things were true; not a single one of them could have pulled it off, not like she did with her fast wheeling and dealing, her last-minute compromises and her uncanny ability to charm monsters. "Still, I have failed you," she reminded them, with a tactful show of humility.
"So what are you going to do about it, Carter?" Nettletongue hissed, her forked tongue darting between her fangs - the crowd didn't know that Monroe had coached the unshakably loyal, disturbing girl to ask just this question on just that cue.
Perfect timing
, she thought; she'd regained some measure of control over them - where once they'd been a gallery of resentment and horror writ across bloodthirsty, dead faces all caterwauling her way, now they were reminded of the supporting role she'd played in all their Requiems. What Kindred could honestly say that about another, that she'd done something
