Chapter 5 Claws and Fangs

• ~~Jack~~
• Jack woke up in a bed. It was a nice change from the last time he woke up. Comfy sheets, quiet, no pain in his belly or blood soaking his clothes.
• With the slow dawn of realization, he sat up. It was Julias's spare bedroom, the one on the same floor as the kitchen and living room. The blinds — apparently on a timer — started to open on their own, and pulled aside to expose the night sky of the city.
• When the sun had started to come up the night before, the change was immediate. The exhaustion overwhelmed him, and within moments, he'd collapsed onto the bed with no say in the matter. Thank god Julias's place had timed curtains, or he'd have probably cooked.
• So it was the next night. The next night of being a vampire. He looked down at his stomach; those stabs wounds were still there, closed and healed but never fully sealing.
• "Still no Julias. I wonder... if his mission got him...." He shook his head, slapped his own face a few times, and got up. He'd never been in Julias's place without him. Without thinking about it, he walked into the kitchen, poured himself a glass of blood, and sat down on the couch. He'd seen Julias do it a hundred times, and now, it seemed so natural.
• He turned on the TV.
• "—orpse was found in the South Side docks. Mrs. Pavala's head had been cut from the body, and was found some ways down the docks."
• Next channel.
• "Mrs. Pavala's widow is left with two sons and a daughter to care f—"
• "—r hopes and condolences go out to the Pavala family and their—"
• "—horrible, bloodthirsty monster could do such a th-" He shut the TV off, and let his head hang.
• There wasn't anything he could do, other than wait for Julias to get back. So he sat there and stared at the glass of red in his hands between his knees. Images of Mrs. Pavala's face — fuck he never counted on learning her name — forced their way into his mind. Cold dead eyes. Warm, tasty, delicious blood.
• Nothing to be done but brood, so he just listened to the silent clocks. It wasn't until an hour later that the door opened. Julias walked in, far worse for wear than Jack was. His sire's clothes were ruined, and his face was covered in dirt, ash, and blood.
• "What happened to you?" Jack said.
• "Rebecca! That she-witch nearly killed me. Left me for the sun."
• "Shit. So she's nearly killed both of us in one night."
• "Yeah. Yeah she did. I'm going to catch that Daeva bitch and crucify her and let the sun eat her. And I'll watch."
• Jack blinked. His sire was pacing around, fists clenched, livid and dripping with fury. His teeth were grinding, fangs bared, and something else. Something inhuman and unseen was coming off of him in waves, like rippling waves of... of something. Something that shook him to his core.
• "I'm sorry," he said, and after taking a moment to compose himself, he sat down next to Jack. "And you? I just sent you back to my place on the night of your embrace. That is not good form on my part."
• Jack took a moment to look at his friend. Part of him wanted to scream at him, to yell and cry and tear into him and blame him. How dare he leave him alone? He didn't know that the sun would make him pass out, he didn't know about feeding on living humans, and... he didn't know about whatever it was that took control the night before.
• So he just turned on the TV.
• "—hunt for Mrs. Pavala's killer continues. Coroners say it has been one day since her body was dumped into the water, and that she died of bloodless before her mutilation. Please be warned, the following scenes are quite graphic."
• Julias turned it off, and stared at him. Jack could only maintain eye contact for a couple seconds before he had to look away. He could feel himself trying to cry, but the tears didn't come; corpses don't cry.
• "I... I am so sorry Jack. I... Viktor... I...." He stopped. He probably figured words wouldn't mean anything. He figured right. "Did you... lose control?"
• "Yeah. Seems that way." He forced his voice to not break. He was already sobbing, a voice crack was not what he needed right now, so he just sipped his blood.
• "The beast. That thing you feel inside you. If you don't feed for a long time, it... it takes control. It shouldn't have happened so soon, but... maybe because you'd been stabbed so much, and had to heal, it...."
• "There's a beast inside me?"
• "All of us."
• "Wonderful." He took another sip of his drink, and wiped away at his eyes. No tears, but it felt like there should be. "I had... had to get rid of the body." The body. Say it. The body. "Had to get rid of it, and hide that she'd been... bitten."
• "I can't even... you did the right thing, Jack. Always preserve the Masquerade. But it should never have gone down like this. This is all my fault."
• "Just tell me one thing. Does drinking someone always kill them?" Am I going to be killing people on a regular basis?
• "No, not at all." The pain on Julias's face was so blatant, Jack could feel it on his shoulders. "I'll teach you how to drink someone, the Kiss, and you'll see it's not so bad a thing. It can be a great thing even."
• Jack choked on a laugh. "Great thing... hard to see that side right now."
• "You'll see. Really." His sire stood up, took his drink away, and gave him a pat on the shoulder. "Much as this sucks, this is why I sired you, Jack. You did something god awful, and you took care of it when any other freshly embraced would have just disappeared, or waited for sunrise."
• "... yay me."
• "I'm serious Jack. You did good."
• "I killed someone!" He stood up and stared straight up at his sire. The difference in their sizes didn't matter, the difference in their ages didn't matter, and all the favors in the world Jack owed Julias didn't matter. He shoved his friend back and shoved him hard, hard enough that he fell back against the counter harder than he'd ever have been able to shove him were he alive. "I killed someone! They're...."
• Julias didn't even fight him back. The big guy just sat down at the counter he'd been pushed against, and listened.
• "She's dead."
• "I know, Jack, I know."
• "I... I don't...."
• "You feel bad you killed someone, even though it wasn't really your fault. Remember that feeling, but don't let it bury you." Julias smiled, walked over to him, and put a hand on his shoulder again, even as Jack sobbed a few more times. "It will keep you human."
• ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
• ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
• ~~Julias~~
• There she was, bitch supreme.
• Julias stood way up high, a good twenty feet above the unsuspecting kindred. The remains of the fire were barely enough to call a building, but then the abandoned apartment had been rundown and rotting for sometime. At least before it was burned to a crisp. Not many homes remained this close to the factory district, but warehouses remained at large, and Julias kept low upon one's roof. He hated to leave Jack again, but his childe was home, fed, safe, and this had to be dealt with and dealt with now.
• Rebecca was dressed in jeans and a hoodie, which were hilariously out of place with her usual attire, the Daeva vixen, but it made it far easier to move about at night, ignored in the bowels of a city like the warehouse district. She was rummaging through the burned wood and blackened furniture for something, but what? The shattered array of ruined beams and barely standing walls were enough to block Julias's view; he'd have to sneak in closer.
• It's hard to sneak in a suit, and shoes, and especially when you generally suck at sneaking. The beast in him was not interested in sneaking. It wanted to walk in through the front door and bend his prey's mind to his will like some idiot puppet, but that wasn't going to work. If he wanted what Rebecca had, he'd have to catch her by surprise. Daeva are fast.
• He climbed down the side of the warehouse, taking care that each step onto the siding was quiet. He'd have jumped down but shoes landing on asphalt weren't quiet enough, so he climbed. He must have looked hilarious, he imagined, still in his suit but scaling down the side of a building. Once he was low enough, he gripped the side of a window and let himself slide down with gravity, just slow enough to land with only the gentle tap of a shoe.
• She was still there, rummaging and digging, but still too far to see with any detail. He knew he wouldn't be able to get closer, but there had to be something. This was the factory district, and there had to be rats.
• He took a moment to look around while keeping himself to the dark. Indeed, a rat passed by, no doubt on a journey from one abandoned house to one of the warehouses to scavenge. Pressed to the wall of the warehouse, it stopped to look at Julias, its beady little eyes wide in the dark. Julias looked straight back at it. He could feel the tiny creature's presence, its quick little mind, its silent feet, and its odd intelligence. He could feel every bit of its self-awareness even as the creature lost control of itself.
• Then, he could feel it hand itself over to him, and become him.
• Now Julias was the one scurrying in the dark. He turned to look at the body of the man slumped against a wall in the dark of the night. His eyes weren't wide or beady, and his suit was indeed hilariously out of place. Now, with a form slick and quiet and unnoticeable, Julias crawled over the leg of his old comatose body, and scampered toward Rebecca.
• "There has to be something," she said. The red-haired vixen was opening drawers and opening folders, all too preoccupied to notice the little rat. His fur blended nicely into the ash of the burned home, so much that he might as well not have existed as he got closer still. His feet didn't even rustle the soot beneath him.
• She eventually found a box buried underneath more folders.
• "Please don't be locked, please... shit."
• Shit. She found something. His claws dug effortlessly into the dirt and burnt wood, and he worked his way up a beam to a higher position. Little whiskers tickled the air as he pressed to the wall, but he had to get closer and see what she was talking about. To be silent was effortless, but now that he was above her, he cursed within his little rat mind. He couldn't see shit; damn a rat's blurry vision. He could hear just fine though, every little detail.
• Minutes went by, then an hour. Tony's childe continued to dig through the wreckage, and as time went by she only got more and more anxious. Soon she was actually pushing pillars over, lifting objects no young woman should be able to lift, and getting dirtier than any Daeva he'd ever seen bother to get. She could have just ripped the box open, but then, Mekhet were smart. A damaged box could mean ruined contents.
• "Come on, he has to... fuck yes. Finally."
• Rebecca wasn't stupid though. Or at least, not so stupid as to go shouting to the rooftops what she was doing. She kept quiet and murmured to herself as she worked. And he could hear every word of it. He could even hear the tick of metal opening; she'd found a key.
• "Drop location... North Side... a month."
• He laughed. Well, a rat didn't laugh, so he let out a tiny squeak of joy. Her quiet muttering was his for the listening.
• "Blah blah... Antoinette's downfall?" Rebecca stood up straight, tensed, and slipped something into her pocket. Then she was gone. Her insane speed combined with his blurry rat vision made following her with eyes impossible.
• He didn't need to though. Now he knew what he had to do, and he had one month to do it.
• He broke the connection, and the snap back into his own body left a dizzying wave to crash into him. With a groan, he forced himself back to his feet, dusted himself off, and started to walk back home. A whistle had joined his gait, and with his hands in his pockets, he even found a skip in his step. He couldn't stop smiling.
• Rebecca would find out he was still alive soon, and it would eat at her how that happened. He definitely needed to thank Beatrice for that. He now knew what Tony and Rebecca were up to, so a failed mission was partially recovered. On top of it all, his friend had nearly died, then killed someone, and yet his friend was now his childe, and of his own willpower managed to preserve the Masquerade in the most horrible of situations. Things were bouncing back.
• His mind wandered back to Beatrice. The sexy Nosferatu — a paradox he still blamed Jack for — had saved his life and then let him go. He'd misjudged the crocodile-mouth in the past, back when they met at a cross-covenant meeting in the Elysium. That must have been ten years ago.
• "Saved my life, let me go... if Garry knew. Heh." He laughed. Could he have found a potential ally in her? She was a loose cannon if there ever was one, strong, wild, and brazen. If he gave her the explosives, she'd probably have blown up the Prince's tower just to watch the fallout.
• Whatever her plan was for him, he did owe her. And for the first time in decades, he had no idea what sort of favor this Kindred he owed would ask for.
• He found himself looking forward to it.