Detroit Musings
The road is never what is seems, and I never seem to wind up where I think I'm going. Travel as a Naga Raja sucks. I hate having to find dead bodies on the road. The meat is always tied to trouble, and there is never time to do a meal justice. I know I will never be a Chef...but I hate gulping bloody flesh like some damn barbaric werewolf.
Not to mention the new personality in my head. Fuck I hate that. Especially a backwards ass Confederate redneck. I thought Son was bad (he was), but Sheriff is an absolute moron. The only thing that kept him from wandering out in the sun one day was his lack of humanity driving him to die before the sun came up. The only upside to his personality is that I can rifle through his memories occasionally to find things out about Chicago...not that he knows much Son didn't, except for things that have happened in the last ten years. Alexis Leblanc must have been really desperate to embrace such an idiot.
That thought leads me to watching my own new Child. She is so sweet and innocent, and here I have her tied up with the Sabbat in the cesspool that is Detroit. I love her like my daughter...and that's just weird, it must be the vaulderie influencing my emotions. That embrace is a weight on my conscience. All I can hope is that I can teach her some tools that will help her not become a complete heathen like the Forsaken.
The fucking Forsaken. What a cluster fuck in cheap suits. It's no wonder that the Sabbat wanted these miscreants to stay in Chicago, out of sight out of mind. I don't think there's a useful part of them or operational intelligence at any level. At best they are shock troops, at worst they are a traveling circus house of clowns.
Cameron is a stooge. He is wrapped up in the idea that he is some sort of leader. He leads Jack and shit, and Jack left town. Bill laughs behind his hand at Cameron, and only complies with his wishes when it would be either fun (which means killing/maiming/tearing things up) or somebody with a brain is watching. Samson likes Cameron and follows him...but I think Samson would follow a German shepherd that barked in a conversational pattern. The shovel heads don't know any better, but I notice that they are listening more to their collective Sires than Cameron. It has also not escaped my notice that Bill seems to be pushing me toward a Monomacy clash with Cameron. I am pretty sure I could kill him, but I don't think it is worth it. That's Cameron I mean...Bill might be something else.
Bill Butler...that creature is more than he lets on. Bill seems to push the others to darker and darker behavior, all the while not really doing much himself. He doesn't seem to have any skills at necromancy like myself, but he definitely at times feels like he is working ritual magic when I'm not looking. I am not sure why my gut tells me that, but it does. His childers behavior when it comes to him is also very disturbing.
Samson is a blood bath waiting to happen. Did I mention that Samson is simple? If there was ever a bad stereotype of a muscle head Samson is it. The problem is he has all the empathy of a blender. Samson needs a keeper, and or someone to teach him some Path of Enlightenment before he goes wight and we have to hunt him down.
I guess fame has it's benefits. The Androgyny has invited us into it's home, which is both refreshing and terrifying.
The Sons of Santos
Awakening in the utter darkness that is the basement below the former church Club Ishtar came in the moment when my tortured brain had been revisiting the sweating hellish darkness of the Cambodian pit. While my skin was cool, I was covered in a thin sheen of blood, my sheets sticky with the "sweat" of the undead, the curling hunger in my gut a slightly angry pit bull in a cage. I reflexively swung up, the hellish speed I had acquired coming into play, knowing that motion released means freedom...of a sort. I nearly gasped for air, though my dead lungs did not need it. If my heart beat, it would have pounded.
My Hell has already been visited, and now I carry it with me. My Hell would be that moment of awakening in a pit covered in dirt, guts, blood, and not being able to move. Somewhere not in my head but definitely not outside my consciousness I heard "I never buried anyone alive...that would have been fiiine." in a silky cold southern drawl. My will snapped into place, and I pushed that sadistic prick Balthazar out of my head. I hadn't digested his soul yet...so I needed to keep him out.
I never reached for a light, my senses became sharper, the plush of the carpet showing indentations of past footsteps. I could smell the barely clean water that came out of Detroit's taps. I smelled the tangy, metal smell of the bloody flesh in the pan nearby. I had packed the arm in ice, but now it was cool water, wrapped around in plastic. Most people think that the plastic will cover the smell of flesh, but it only adds a chemical grit to the coppery, buttery odor as the flesh begins to slowly decompose. My snarling hunger wanted to feast, my meat teeth threatening to push into my gums. The whole room stank of light mold and the musky smell that the occasional rat and mouse left behind.
I could still smell the fetid stench of the other vampires who had come to visit me in the last hour before dawn. Vampires smell like the coppery fugue of fresh blood, yet hanging with the rot of what they had consumed. On top of that was also that earthy smell of the first days decomposition. But vampires never rot right? Not so. That first day of death never goes away, and no matter what else they do, they always smell of the grave, of the death of their own body. I no longer noticed my own stench but any time I got close to other vampires, I could smell it, especially when my hunting senses are in effect. Lacreche in particular smells of some ionization, almost like he has been standing high out on the wing of an airplane at thirty thousand feet. I notice the smell mostly on those who use a lot of vicissitude, perhaps soon I too will carry that scent.
Lacreche wants the Forsaken to tell some drug dealers that they have failed to pay their due to Moneyshot, the pack that owns Club Ishtar. It (because I am not sure what sex is appropriate with that creature) is so sly about everything, I keep checking my pants to see if they are hanging open whenever I am near it. It smiles, and I feel like the fantasy meat in a strip club. While I know Lacreche doesn't want to anger me...It seems content to see what pulling my strings provides. You would think that such a predator would know it could wind up missing pieces doing that with me, but perhaps not. Many of the elders look down on me because I am so young. Though with my success's in Chicago and New York, several are watching me more carefully.
I shake those thoughts loose and take a shower. I never turn on a light, enjoying the soft solitude that the darkness gives me. In the dark I can still think of myself as more human, more normal. My heart aches, I loved showering with Susan. She was a joy under the water, her warm, satiny skin shining in the light. We often never made it out of the spray before making love, satisfying our lust as the heat ran out. Then we would kiss and touch as we prepared for our day...that is the stuff of humanity. The warm brush of sweet lips to your own, the musky freshness of your brides wet hair mingling with the shampoo. Her voice the pleasant tinkling of bells in your ears, the salve on whatever saddness's you might have in the day ahead. I whisper her name, softly, knowing that too strong an invocation would bring her shade to my side. I can never be too lax, my dead are altogether too near at hand.
Drying myself I finally bow to necessity. Turning my senses down I flip on the light. While I can tell the make up of a shirt or pants in the dark...I can't really tell what color they might be. I dressed casually in jeans and a button up shirt of a dark polyester rayon material. Satisfied I belt on my gun and secrete cutting implements around my body. I never know when fresh flesh is handy. While I have teeth that can tear off chunks, the fastidious chef in me longs for good cuts, for a well set spread to go with my pound of flesh. Which brought my hunger back, so I ate the meat I had put by last night. My meat teeth pushed down into my mouth, filling it with razor sharp blades, designed to make the meat I consumed small enough to swallow. I used my knives to cut strips, savoring each bite. It was cold, and had started to pass through rigor mortis into real decomposition. Not awful, but a long way from the freshness I craved. More like day old hamburger. The flesh filled the Void in my stomach, and now only my craving for blood haunted me.
Washing my face after eating I glanced in the mirror once more. My face was cleanly shaved, my hair rough cut but passable. While I can shave, I haven't mastered barbering my hair and the last hair cut I had before my change was in prison, at the hands of a man who was on death row with me. Ghosts swam at the edges of my vision, and for now I didn't care to know whose, mine or the dead of this place. My sense of the Other Side is stronger under the earth, but I have learned enough control to be able to choose when they bother me. For the millionth time I cursed the bastard who made me this way, hungry for flesh and blood, and stuck seeing those who had died both those I consumed both before and after my passing, he must have really hated me. At least mortals seemed to pass through me quickly, and if I didn't hold the shade would fade in a few days. Vampires seem to live on forever when you consume them hence Balthazar lounging in the back of my head.
I walked upstairs into the horny wail of saxophone laced jazz. Cigarette and pot smoke, beer, and a riot of other alcohol smells assaulted my nostrils. There was the pervasive cloying smell of the sweet living humans here. My brain saw them as people. A sexy, blond woman with long legs. A well built black man holding a giggling oriental woman. A white yuppie couple wide eyed and shocked at the decadent setting of Club Ishtar. Under it all the rank, moldy smell of vampires, like snakes in a hole. My senses saw: Food, Food, Food, and competition for food. I growled to myself and walked toward the front, squashing those urges under a metaphorical boot looking for my pack.
In a group stood my pack. The most obvious is the hulking mass of Samson, his blond hair cut into a flat table. Samson is huge. Pure muscle and fists. His face is blocky and hard, looking very much like it was chiseled out of pale, angry stone. He was pretty nasty as a human, and he has lost most of what kindness he had since then.
Next to him is the whip thin form of Bill Butler. Bill is tall, and smokes his cigarettes between his forefinger and thumb. His eyes are golden, with irises shaped like those of a cat. Tonight he was in his "best duds". He looked sharp, and I could see him looking sharply around him tasting the crowd. Bill sees himself as a good vampire. He treats his pack with some respect, kills when he feels like it, and has no love for the kine he touches. There is something else that's off about him, but as yet I don't know what that is, being close to him is like wearing a shirt that has too much starch, everything looks fine but it chafes.
My dead heart ached. I could see the four neonates we had taken all dancing in the crowd, having a good time. None of them seemed to be anything other than carefree teens. I was feeling very protective and compassionate about these four. They were here because of me. Because of the play I made in Chicago to kill that bitch Malkavian, these four had been embraced. Damn it, no matter what I did I seemed to accumulate collateral damage. The more I tried to distance those I care about the more I draw others into my personal tornado of death and destruction. Calla, Kizzie, Erik, and Thom were just college kids out for a good time before we made them shovel heads. In my minds eye Calla seemed to have a lot in common with my daughter Catherine. I suspected it was because of my recent absorption of that damn Ventrue, but I was having a hard time keeping them apart in my mind.
I approached the table where Bill and Samson stood together. They eyed me for a moment, Samson raising his pint of blood-beer to me. Both were warm, they had fed on someone recently. Bill was even slightly flushed, so I figured whoever he had drank from had been inebriated. We stood together companionably for a moment, a pocket of stillness in the sea of writhing humanity.
"The Androgyn wants us to put some fear into a gang that serves him. I thought it might give out neonates another chance to flex their abilities and learn a little." I said to Bill. He smiled a broad smile and took a long drag off of his cigarette. His golden eyes reflected the bouncing lights of the room, and for a brief moment the cherry on his cigarette lit them with a red glow, giving him a maleficent appearance.
"Sounds like a good way to start the party. Any chance we can borrow a car to go talk to these swinging hipsters?" Bill asked, smoke drifting up around his face.
"Yeah, the Androgyn was going to have his Slant get us the keys." I responded.
"Duabntxoo? Man you better not let her hear you call her that, she is bad mojo." Bill glanced around, looking for the little Vietnamese woman.
"Whatever. I'm not too worried about it. I have put a lot of her people in the ground. One more won't matter." I said nonchalantly. While it was no longer a compulsion to actively attack the little Gook bastards...I don't mind letting everyone know I haven't forgotten 'Nam.
