~~Jack~~
Telling Antoinette about Mary had been easier than he thought. Well truthfully, Antoinette talked to him about it, after his mom had filled her in. Jack had promised he wouldn't be visiting Mary for a little while, and Antoinette agreed it was a good idea for both he and his mom to avoid her for a short period of time. His lover also said she might have some ideas, but in the meantime, she'd talk to Samantha about it in depth.
When he'd inquired about 'in depth', she'd dodged the question, saying it was a private business of the Ordo Dracul. He was cool with that. With all the secrets he was learning about the Circle of the Crone, secrets he'd prefer to not know, he was perfectly cool with not learning about the secrets of the Ordo Dracul. Ignorance was bliss.
The hunts continued, but there was still no sign of the hunters, which had everyone on edge. Somehow, the hunters were being healed of the wounds Jack and the others had dealt them, far faster than humanly possible, which had them all anxious to find them as soon as possible. The only explanation was Elen, or maybe some other weird magic the hunters had access to. Either way, it meant the Kindred had to go on the offensive to secure any real advantage, but they couldn't if they couldn't find a target; the hunters were using guerrilla warfare and using it well. It was infuriating.
He joined his proper sweep team with Gloria, Isabella, Clara, and Athalia, and started exploring North Side. It was quiet, out in North Side. It was an hour after sunset, and most people were no longer working. Gloria, their group's Mekhet, was keeping them wrapped in her Face in the Crowd aura, so anyone who spotted them simply wouldn't care. It wasn't past midnight yet, so there was the occasional person walking by, working late hours. As long as no one in their group did something loud or strange, no one would care they existed.
Athalia may as well have put a bell on his neck, with how fixated her eyes were on him. Untrusting. Suspicious. Scared. Gloria and Isabella could tell he changed, and Clara could sense it more than his fellow Kindred, but Athalia could see the reality. The curse, its size and mass, its presence, it was all plainly visible to her. Could she see that it talked? Could she hear its whispering voice in his head, the dark voice telling him to indulge his Kindred desires with all the control of a child entertaining their id? God, he fucking hoped not.
It was good that the curse had manifested itself properly now, instead of being bound to him so tightly by the seal. He could feel its influence more obviously now, instead of a mysterious urge that drove him to violence with subtlety. With its revelation, it was easier to keep it at a distance, and to recognize its desires as something separate from his own. On the other hand, those desires were stronger now, and he knew that at some point, the curse was going to come at him like a typhoon. It was going to overwhelm him, and take control, even if only temporarily.
The memories of the scene at the hospital were still there, maybe a little blurrier than his own memories, but still there. Summoning the crows and unleashing them upon the hunters, the sounds of their screams of agony as hundreds of beaks ripped them open, and the smell of blood and feathers, were permanent memories, cut into his brain with a rusty knife. He could summon that power easily now, and he knew if he did, he would be letting the curse have free reign to run around in his brain. Every time he called upon it, it'd have an easier time getting its claws into him. And he didn't want to give it that opening unless he had to.
Every time he glanced Clara's way, he caught her looking at him. Unlike Athalia, who watched him like he was a bomb ready to go off any moment, Clara could not help but hide her sympathy. She tried, he could see that, but learning that his dead sister was back as a ghost was apparently her breaking point.
"I still can't believe she's back," Clara said.
Isabella, who was ahead of them with Gloria, looked over her shoulder. "Who is back?"
Clara froze, and blinked at him. "Shit, sorry."
Yeah, he hadn't told everyone. It was personal, and not exactly information he wanted floating around. But it wasn't a secret, and maybe it'd be better if people knew.
"My sister is haunting my mother's old home," he said. "And yes, I mean literally haunting."
Everyone stopped walking, and stared at him. Even Athalia, who was following from behind, looked surprised when he glanced her way.
"A ghost?" Gloria said, visibly shaking. "B-But... that means—"
"Yes, ghosts are real," he said. "Our bosses have dealt with them before, I'm sure. No one talks about them, I guess, because they're... problems..." What a lovely way to view the situation, thinking of his dead sister like a problem, like an infestation that wouldn't die easy.
"I have known of only one ghost in my lifetime," Isabella said, the tall Daeva tapping a finger on her chin. "We don't speak of it because... it can be tough to discern what actually happened. Was it a trick of our imagination, a hallucination, some strange repeating dream localized to an area? The one ghost I know of, I passed by the building it haunted. It was... unsettling, to say the least."
"Yeah, that's a good way of describing it. It was unsettling, if unsettling was what you found at the edge of Hell. Now imagine you walked past that edge, down the stairs through each circle of Hell, and then decided to camp out in the center." He ground his teeth, stared at the sidewalk, and started walking. The group started moving again too, but he could tell they were hesitant. Another glance back showed Athalia was still keeping her distance, but not as far as before, as if the story about Mary had softened her a little. Maybe it had. She was a mother.
"That sounds horrible," Gloria said. "Why... why do these horrible things keep happening to you?"
"It's not me, it's my sister." This time, this horrible thing was happening by proxy. That was a step in a better direction, he supposed. Except, not really. If shitty things happened to the people he loved instead of him, that still sucked. "And I don't know. But, we're not out here to talk about my sister."
"Sorry," Clara said again, "I didn't realize people didn't know."
"It's fine, it's fine, really."
"How is she?" Gloria said, earning a raised brow from everyone. "Er, well, you know what I mean."
"She's about as well as you can expect, Gloria. She's furious about her murder." And utterly furious with Jack for having harmed her, in a way. But he wasn't about to bring that up. "Ultimately, the issue with my sister is untimely, and horrible, but there's a bit of good in it. I got to talk to my sister again."
Every woman awwed, even Athalia, though when he whipped his head around, he saw only the hard face of a woman who would never dare utter such a sound. Christ he wished there were some men in this team.
"My point being," he continued, "don't worry about it. Let's just focus on our jobs, ok?"
And they did. Isabella and Gloria were both curious, but they let it go, only offering him the occasional glance as they tried to read him. Clara was a little better at focusing, but every so often he met her gaze, and found that hint of sympathy. Or maybe it was understanding. She'd told him once that she'd lost her brother, a kine, and maybe she was envisioning what she'd do if she'd been in Jack's circumstance. The opportunity to talk to a dead loved one sounded like a good thing on the surface, but the reality was a two-edged sword.
As the hunt went on, Athalia stayed in the back, and kept her eyes on Jack, never quite losing that nervousness she displayed the first time she saw him since the curse awakened. There was more there, though, in her gaze. Maybe she was thinking about Mary, about what it was like for Jack's mother to speak to the ghost of her daughter. When Angela was dead, how would Athalia take any of it?
Fuck him, if they had to deal with Angela's ghost too, he wasn't sure what they'd do. But it wasn't like ghosts were just wandering around, appearing in the wake of everyone dying. There was no Julias ghost, or Barry ghost, or Viktor or Tony or Lucas ghost. A lot of kine and Kindred had died, and one Uratha too, in the past couple years. No ghosts.
But then, most of those people had died in circumstances that made sense, in a strange way. Stephanie the Uratha had died on a hunt. The vampires died as a part of conflicts that arose from being a vampire, from being hunter and hunted, and from the Danse Macabre. Kine died because Kindred preyed upon them, or because of the various, normal reasons kine died. Mary's death, on the other hand, had been a freak of circumstance done by a psychopath, and combined with Jack's memory-wiping her before she died, it was probably that anger that kept her from crossing over.
Now that he'd apologized to her, and she'd apologized to him, she was free to crossover, wasn't she? But she hadn't, not yet, and that was a worry that terrified him.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
A couple days later, it was time to pay Garry a visit.
"I had my first session with the sheriff last night," Damien said. "It was... painful."
"Painful?" He and his friend rode in an Invictus car, the same one that took him and Jessy to see Avery only a couple days ago. "When Julias and I trained, we did a little physical stuff, him teaching me about using Resilience for defense. You should have seen him Damien, in... in the hospital. He took a couple hundred bullets from half a dozen firearms, and kept on coming. He was practically a walking skeleton by the end, and still going. Kicked Sándor's ass, Dominated some hunters, and... yeah."
"Julias was an impressive Ventrue for his age, Jack."
"I wonder how much of that is from the curse. Though, in the memory the curse showed me, Julias's subconscious was... less enthusiastic about trying to break the seal." Not that the seal needed to be broken to let out its power, but whereas Jack had embraced its power when he could, well before the seal was broken, he doubted Julias had.
"Then I can only guess that it was his own talent, same as your own."
Jack laughed, elbow on the door arm, chin on his palm. "I've relied on the curse plenty."
Damien looked at him, for a long time, until Jack turned his head to make eye contact. "I felt nothing of any curse, that time... you know when. Only you, a stubborn Ventrue."
