~~Beatrice~
Part of her wanted to sneak up on Julias, try and catch him by surprise, see if her scant twenty years could get past the man's eyes. Have fun! Play with him, like old times. But, these weren't old times, and her sneaking into his mansion, or trying to at least, was a bad idea. He probably had lookouts about, snipers, and they'd shoot first if they saw suspicious rustling in bushes.
So the front door it was. Knock knock.
"Good evening Miss Damor, Miss Denver," the doorman said. "Please, do come in. The master is in his study."
"Study, eh?" She looked over her shoulder back at Jen. "Cool with just sitting around while Julias and I talk? Join in too, if you want."
Jen nodded and smiled. It was easy to see the girl wasn't following Triss in hopes for sex, but rather, because she didn't want to be alone. Learning the ritual, and testing the ritual, must have been horrible to watch. Going through the process was hell on Earth, but still, she didn't envy Jen having to see it all. Stuck on the sidelines while being forced to watch torture was a horrible way to get introduced to this stuff.
The Nosferatu touched her new necklace, a simple black string with a tiny, white crow skull on it, and followed after the servant.
The study was exactly what you'd expect in a building as old and as grandiose as Viktor's mansion. A tall room lined with bookshelves filled to the rim with books. Fancy, thick carpet the color of blood, against the gold trimmings of walls and columns that held the wood bookshelves in place. In the center of the large room was a beautiful table, thin wood, almost as red as the carpet, and Julias sat before it.
There were a couple books on table, on Hinduism. Another on the history of monsters, vague as that was. Another she didn't recognize; something about artifacts. So, he knew that Azamel was some sort of twisted nightmare version of Ganesha. The book on history of monsters was self-explanatory, but the one about artifacts was odd. Maybe the man was looking into more of the stranger artifacts, things considered magical. Might find something about those handcuffs Jack mentioned.
"Light reading?" she said, coming over to sit at the fancy table across from him. Jen offered the servant a nod, and he returned it before closing the door behind him.
"You could say that." He wasn't reading the books though. Smart phone in hand, he probably had other books opened on that, showing on the phone's screen. Such was the way of the digital age, sitting around surrounded by books and not using them, because ultimately, you had literally 100,000 fold the information available on your phone. Sad, but true.
Once she was comfortable, Julias put the phone down, and smiled at her. Hell, he got up out of his chair, gave her a kiss, a proper one, before sitting back down. Fucker knew how to sprinkle bits of love in just the right way. To inconvenience himself like that, to stop researching, and get up out of his chair just for a kiss? He was too damn good at being romantic.
Which Jen caught onto immediately, and swooned, before she started wandering around the library. Not library, study room. Much as the walls were covered in books, there weren't any rows of the bookshelves.
"How you been?" he said. "Haven't seen you for a few nights."
Triss nodded, shrugging. "Been... getting in deep with Jacob, honestly."
Jen threw a glance her way. Probably didn't expect her to be so forward with Julias about what she was doing.
"Sounds painful," her love said.
That got a laugh out of her, and an eyebrow raise from him.
"I'll tell you about it sometime."
"By all means." He put the phone down, and got in closer to the table, elbows down and eyes on her. "Did you see Jack leaving?"
"No. Was he here?"
"Yeah, got into a little argument."
Ooh, argument between childe and sire. Something she'd never get to experience. Time to pry and learn.
"About what?"
Julias stopped for a moment. Might have been too sensitive to talk about, and if that were the case, he wouldn't tell her. But he was contemplating, which meant he was evaluating; maybe it was Jen's presence's slowing down the evaluation.
"Kid's trying to play nice with everyone. I appreciate that he's taking his role as intermediary with the other paranormals seriously, but he fails to recognize how that niceness can backfire. The specific hangup was Azamel and Athalia."
She winced, and nodded as she leaned in as well, mirroring his position, elbows on the table. "He probably wants to keep Athalia happy, doesn't he? Not kill her daughter."
"He's going to do something stupid, maybe spare the girl's life when an opportunity arrives to do otherwise."
"Hard to imagine." She remembered what the kid looked like when she found him, and how terrifying the imagery was, of Angela sitting on him and ready to cut him into bits. "And of course, she could still be dead. No one's seen her since the accident." Accident was a funny word to pick for actively running someone over, and she smirked.
"If only we were that lucky," Jen said, sighing as she sat on a nearby couch, pulled out her phone, and... probably checked her Twitter feed. Ugh.
"New necklace?" Julias said, hand gesture included.
She smiled. Just like Julias to notice; she loved that. It wasn't like she hadn't worn similar, things that matched her tattoos and piercings, and yet the man noticed anyway. Always the little things that made her smile grow.
"Mmhmm. Jacob's been putting me through hell, and this is a first step to becoming... his apprentice, I guess." She flicked a fingernail against the skull, and cradled it between two claws. "I'll show you later how it works."
"You should have seen her, Julias," Jen said. "It was... disgusting, and brutal, and I know few Kindred who could stomach what she went through."
