Alan Wolfe ran. His heart could no longer beat in terror, but he felt it squeeze with an all too real fear. Everything was coming apart. The betrayals came one after another and staggered Wolfe like hammer-blows. Perhaps this is why Alex believes herself to be a monster, he thought. Perhaps after centuries of this, there was nothing left inside capable of love or trust.
Except maybe that wasn’t true. Alex trusted Alan enough to extend that trust to Sasha, based only on his word. And maybe she even loved him. But Alan wasn’t going to take that risk, he wasn’t going to let Sasha die.
His mind still raced, however and he only wished that his feet and wings could move as fast. Dorian was in on this, maybe behind it. He’d altered Alan’s memories, altered Johnny’s, made the Gangrel elder a servant to his own twisted childe. Brightwind had turned Johnny against him, made Athro and Fostern fight. Sasha’s mother was a Black Spiral Dancer and she would have to die. Even the Nosferatu were not what they seemed, either willing participants in this evil, or else wretched dupes like Johnny.
Wolfe knew he was running into danger worse than he had ever faced. Dorian, Brightwind, Lily…any of them would be a threat by themselves and of the three, Alan thought he might only be able to take Brightwind. If he caught him alone. But that was his only hope; to catch up with Brightwind and save Sasha, then flee for help.
I love you, Sasha. I’m coming.
Tuesday, September 9, 2008
Tuesday, September 2, 2008
Prophecy
Alan Wolfe slept lightly, even for him. Every sound, even new smells wafting into the cave on the cold air, brought him to the very surface of unconsciousness. Nearby, showing more trust than he thought her capable of, Alex slept in the ancient wolf den. Sasha crouched nearby, occasionally rising to stretch or pace to keep herself awake. She was supposed to be keeping watch.
Several times during the day, Alan was aware that she came and kneeled next to the last figure in this small cave. Her mother, Lily Black.
Her mother’s visit to Valerton came as a surprise. In half a dozen years, mostly spent living in far off London, Sasha’s mother had never visited her, or even returned her letters. The distance between the two was wide, and when Alan met her, it was clear that she was not here to bridge it.
Hardly glancing at her daughter, Lily ordered her out of her own office to talk to Alan. Wolfe wanted to get up and hit her. Sasha wasn’t having an easy time of this and her mother didn’t even seem to care. What had happened to make her so cold, so distant?
She announced that she was a Silent Strider, which later turned out to be only part of the truth. She readily told Wolfe that Sasha’s father had been a Shadowlord kin from Japan, or Hakken, which might have been Japanese for Shadowlord for all Alan knew. But she hadn’t told Sasha anything of her birthright and was even mad at Alan for doing so.
It was obvious that they were not going to get along, even passing over her open hatred for vampires. But her anger that he had brought Sasha into the world of darkness, and that he was her lover, gave him some hope. If she wanted Sasha kept out of the dark dangers underneath the surface of the world, if she disapproved of Alan because he was a vampire, maybe she cared about Sasha after all. He knew that lupines tended to be distant from their kin. There were centuries, even millennia of traditions of arranged marriages and breeding, and besides, a garou’s life was dangerous and the further they stayed from their family, the further away they kept those dangers.
He was shocked that she had not only heard to the Gaia’s Blood prophecy, but that it was spread in different versions over much of the world. For something supposedly created by vampires, diverse garou seemed to know a lot about it. He didn’t get long to think about it before Lily black was inserting herself into the prophecy, claiming that she was one of the two women destined to help him.
Wolfe knew she was wrong. He had Sasha and Alex and that felt right. Although she was right that having a garou along may be useful when dealing with their prophecies and he could not think of a better fighter for this cause unless Black Johnny stood with him.
He made it Sasha’s call. He felt protective, but in a much different way than he had before. It wasn’t just her life he was trying to save from dangers real and imagined. His lover was obviously heart broken. She craved a love that not even he could give her. If Lily couldn’t give it to her, then he would at least make sure that she didn’t hurt Sasha any further.
It was another few days before things came apart. Alex agreed to accompany Wolfe and Sasha to Johnny’s caves. Alan smiled at her. How could she claim to be a monster? She was willing to delay clan business, expose her heart to him, even trust Sasha to stand over her during the day if necessary, all to help him. It made it harder to push her away when she put her arms around him and whispered in his ear. He hated to hurt her, but he loved Sasha.
Alex arranged to have all of Sasha’s equipment brought to her manse. The sprawling house had much more room, and a better power supply than Alan’s low-rent apartment, and she was willing to offer it as a safe place for her Sasha to do their studies. Studies that had drastically changed in purpose now. Robin Red was suddenly an ally, not an enemy.
As they walked up the scree to Johnny’s cave, Alan reflected briefly that if he was never the envy of the local Toreadore, that surrounded by Sasha and her equally beautiful mother, and Alex Dorian, that he would be now. Things seemed to be going so well.
Until they found the prophecy. There was something in the air, there, nothing real or tangible, nothing seen or smelled. But Wolfe knew that those words were not meant to be seen by all. In the centuries of his inhabitance, Johnny had never seen the glyphs carved plainly into the stone around the deepest cavern. Alan soared out over the underground lake, taking in the words of the prophecy.
The last section sent chills through his undead body. If it were true, he would have to sacrifice one of those who helped him. Sasha. Alex.
Perhaps the worry distracted him, but he never saw the betrayal coming. So cold and aloof, Alan had assumed that Lily Black was just a cold bitch and that bearing Sasha had only been done as a duty to continue the garou species. Then she took the scrap of notepaper, turned in the dark, and ran.
The sight of her lupus form as she shifted, startled Wolfe, but he did not place the importance of her bile-green eyes and ragged pelt until Alex shared what she had sensed in Johnny’s cave earlier. His memories had been stolen, and his cave-painting journal had been erased, but the memories that seeped into the stone told her that he had met Lily Black before, and that she was a Black Spiral Dancer.
The name was old and powerful, like a memory of the ghost stories he used to swap with his siblings as a child. He could almost hear them moving in the dark, an ancient tribe of garou gone over to the enemy, devoted to the worship of the Wyrm that was slowly killing all of Gaia. Only…there was one moving in the dark.
Alan changed his shape and flew hard and fast, his wingtips brushing the dank rock, the dark rocks flashing by him in a blur that only his gleaming red eyes could see. Strangely, even though he knew that Black Spiral Dancers were some of the most dangerous creatures to walk the world of darkness, and that their interest in the prophecy was deadly, he was thinking of Sasha. Hoping that he would not have to kill her mother.
He fell on her as he caught up with her at the mouth of Johnny’s cave, but couldn’t stop her. She was too fast, too powerful. But Wolfe figured out quickly where she was going. Brightwind’s cabin. Shit.
But Johnny was there. Alan felt some of the hope that he had begun this evening with return. They had been tricked and betrayed, Spiral Dancers had thrust their ugly snouts into a struggle that was already mysterious and deadly. But Johnny was there. Alex was with Sasha, and despite her feelings she would let nothing happen to her. Johnny could no doubt take care of Brightwind and Lily. They could do it together.
And Brightwind threw that confidence back in Alan’s face. Over the centuries, Alan had spent a great deal of time with Black Johnny. His sire, his teacher, the man who had taught him such control that in a century and a half, a pair of wolf’s eyes were the only mark of the beast upon Alan. He had gone through periods of paternal affection, craving approval and love. There had been bitterness as well for all the times that the older Gangrel rejected his affection, even anger because the elder had embraced him and stolen his life. But when Brightwind, the psychotic Indian, began to order the proud elder, and he began to slink like a beaten dog towards Wolfe, he felt real pain.
Maybe not a father, but a teacher. A mentor. Now he turned at Brightwind’s command – who was blood-bound to Johnny, who shouldn’t have been able to dominate him – and leapt at Alan. His jaws slammed into Alan’s gut, fangs crushing, snapping bone and gouging flesh. Wolfe threw his sire away and lowered his gun.
Practically, he doubted that a double-barreled shotgun could hurt Johnny, even at close range, but he wasn’t sure he could shoot his Athro regardless. But the straight fact was that he was no match for the ancient Gangrel. Wolfe threw himself back, fumbling out his zippo, and lit the refuse of Brightwind’s cabin alight.
The flames may hold Johnny back, even send him away and Brightwind would have to face them as well. Maybe he would even burn to death in the conflagration. Holding his torn stomach, Alan saw that half his plan worked. The lupine look of misery was erased from Johnny’s face as primal fear took over. He turned and leapt away from the rising fire, hurtling his monstrous animal body into the flimsy rear wall of the cabin. Wood and earth tore and the elder ran into the night. Alan silently apologized, knowing that Johnny would be forever marked by his frenzy tonight, and that sign of the beast was Alan’s fault.
Good. He was safe, and he couldn’t be controlled by Brightwind. If the elder was wise, he would stay away until Brightwind was dead so that he couldn’t be commanded. Alan hoped like hell that Johnny backed out. But Brightwind was still there, braving the flames at began to flicker between them.
Alan grimaced. Bullets and knives he could shrug off and heal easily, but there was something about fang and claw, those of vampires or lupines, that struck to the marrow, to the soul. Blood actually welled up from the wound, soaking the shreds of his white t-shirt, but he gripped his shotgun tightly. Brightwind was one step from being an animal and had much more to fear from the flames than Alan did. Even wounded he had an edge.
But Alan wasn’t stupid. It was a new moon, and the darkness could hide any trick. Alan scuffed his right foot, making it look like he was only widening his stance, but also clearing accumulated bones and debris from the ground in the doorway. If Brightwind gained the upper hand, Wolfe could retreat below the earth and let Brightwind face the flames alone.
The crazed Shaman turned and ran. He ducked through the hole Johnny had made, letting the fire claim his ramshackle dwelling. He’d only build another. Wolfe was disappointed that his flight was calculated, not frenzied. It meant that he chose to leave because he had other plans, or because he thought that someone or something else would take care of Alan.
Lily! She should still be some distance behind him, maybe five or ten minutes. But smoke was rising into the black sky and flames threw light into the forest around them. She’d see the fire and come faster, abandoning her efforts to shake possible trackers.
She came soon enough, not on four legs but two – though not as the beautiful older woman Alan had met the night before. She stood over eight feet tall, slim and feral like that Egyptian god of the dead. Her black coat was mangy and ragged and she raked the clearing with her sickly green gaze.
The fire held her attention long enough, the acrid smoke chocking her nostrils. Wolfe moved up as close behind her as he could, shotgun held out. He should have killed her and done a service to Gaia, the garou and all of Valerton. But she was still Sasha’s mother… he couldn’t hurt her that way.
How do you stop a creature like this without killing it? Wolfe wasn’t even sure any longer if he could kill her. He raised his shotgun only an arm’s length behind her, leveled the gun at her waist. Hopefully it would be enough to stop her, but not kill her. It was.
The boom echoed into the night. She howled in agony as the shot tore through her, ripping a hole in her belly that Alan could have thrust his arm through. She toppled forward, changing as she fell. He turned her over, a tattooed older woman, looking so much more like her daughter now that unconsciousness had robbed her features of her perpetual cold scowl. The hole in her stomach gaped and seeped blood into the earth. Alan wrapped his already bloodied jacket around her waist. She bled and she breathed, if only barely. God, these creatures were tough. Gaia built her defenders strong.
An owl carried a message back to Sasha and Alex and brought them to him, and together they made their way back to Johnny’s cave. Wolfe was nervous being there, a place where it would be only too easy for Johnny, Brightwind, or Lily’s pack, if she had one, to find them. But no matter how Brightwind had escaped the blood-bond or gained control over his sire, Alan was still sure that he could not walk freely under the sun.
So they slept, while Lily lay unconscious, gravely wounded, but astoundingly recovering and not declining, and Sasha kept watch.
A Black Spiral Dancer pack might be out there, waiting for Lily to return with the full prophecy. Someone had messed with Johnny’s mind, and the only people powerful enough to do so where Prince Dorian and the Primogen, powerful enemies. And they still had to find a way to revive the lichen so it could do it’s job cleansing the forest (and Wolfe damned well wanted to learn where it came from). But what he kept thinking about over and over as Alex and Lily lay quietly and Sasha paced nervously, was that if the prophecy came true, he was going to have to sacrifice either Alex or Sasha.
Several times during the day, Alan was aware that she came and kneeled next to the last figure in this small cave. Her mother, Lily Black.
Her mother’s visit to Valerton came as a surprise. In half a dozen years, mostly spent living in far off London, Sasha’s mother had never visited her, or even returned her letters. The distance between the two was wide, and when Alan met her, it was clear that she was not here to bridge it.
Hardly glancing at her daughter, Lily ordered her out of her own office to talk to Alan. Wolfe wanted to get up and hit her. Sasha wasn’t having an easy time of this and her mother didn’t even seem to care. What had happened to make her so cold, so distant?
She announced that she was a Silent Strider, which later turned out to be only part of the truth. She readily told Wolfe that Sasha’s father had been a Shadowlord kin from Japan, or Hakken, which might have been Japanese for Shadowlord for all Alan knew. But she hadn’t told Sasha anything of her birthright and was even mad at Alan for doing so.
It was obvious that they were not going to get along, even passing over her open hatred for vampires. But her anger that he had brought Sasha into the world of darkness, and that he was her lover, gave him some hope. If she wanted Sasha kept out of the dark dangers underneath the surface of the world, if she disapproved of Alan because he was a vampire, maybe she cared about Sasha after all. He knew that lupines tended to be distant from their kin. There were centuries, even millennia of traditions of arranged marriages and breeding, and besides, a garou’s life was dangerous and the further they stayed from their family, the further away they kept those dangers.
He was shocked that she had not only heard to the Gaia’s Blood prophecy, but that it was spread in different versions over much of the world. For something supposedly created by vampires, diverse garou seemed to know a lot about it. He didn’t get long to think about it before Lily black was inserting herself into the prophecy, claiming that she was one of the two women destined to help him.
Wolfe knew she was wrong. He had Sasha and Alex and that felt right. Although she was right that having a garou along may be useful when dealing with their prophecies and he could not think of a better fighter for this cause unless Black Johnny stood with him.
He made it Sasha’s call. He felt protective, but in a much different way than he had before. It wasn’t just her life he was trying to save from dangers real and imagined. His lover was obviously heart broken. She craved a love that not even he could give her. If Lily couldn’t give it to her, then he would at least make sure that she didn’t hurt Sasha any further.
It was another few days before things came apart. Alex agreed to accompany Wolfe and Sasha to Johnny’s caves. Alan smiled at her. How could she claim to be a monster? She was willing to delay clan business, expose her heart to him, even trust Sasha to stand over her during the day if necessary, all to help him. It made it harder to push her away when she put her arms around him and whispered in his ear. He hated to hurt her, but he loved Sasha.
Alex arranged to have all of Sasha’s equipment brought to her manse. The sprawling house had much more room, and a better power supply than Alan’s low-rent apartment, and she was willing to offer it as a safe place for her Sasha to do their studies. Studies that had drastically changed in purpose now. Robin Red was suddenly an ally, not an enemy.
As they walked up the scree to Johnny’s cave, Alan reflected briefly that if he was never the envy of the local Toreadore, that surrounded by Sasha and her equally beautiful mother, and Alex Dorian, that he would be now. Things seemed to be going so well.
Until they found the prophecy. There was something in the air, there, nothing real or tangible, nothing seen or smelled. But Wolfe knew that those words were not meant to be seen by all. In the centuries of his inhabitance, Johnny had never seen the glyphs carved plainly into the stone around the deepest cavern. Alan soared out over the underground lake, taking in the words of the prophecy.
The last section sent chills through his undead body. If it were true, he would have to sacrifice one of those who helped him. Sasha. Alex.
Perhaps the worry distracted him, but he never saw the betrayal coming. So cold and aloof, Alan had assumed that Lily Black was just a cold bitch and that bearing Sasha had only been done as a duty to continue the garou species. Then she took the scrap of notepaper, turned in the dark, and ran.
The sight of her lupus form as she shifted, startled Wolfe, but he did not place the importance of her bile-green eyes and ragged pelt until Alex shared what she had sensed in Johnny’s cave earlier. His memories had been stolen, and his cave-painting journal had been erased, but the memories that seeped into the stone told her that he had met Lily Black before, and that she was a Black Spiral Dancer.
The name was old and powerful, like a memory of the ghost stories he used to swap with his siblings as a child. He could almost hear them moving in the dark, an ancient tribe of garou gone over to the enemy, devoted to the worship of the Wyrm that was slowly killing all of Gaia. Only…there was one moving in the dark.
Alan changed his shape and flew hard and fast, his wingtips brushing the dank rock, the dark rocks flashing by him in a blur that only his gleaming red eyes could see. Strangely, even though he knew that Black Spiral Dancers were some of the most dangerous creatures to walk the world of darkness, and that their interest in the prophecy was deadly, he was thinking of Sasha. Hoping that he would not have to kill her mother.
He fell on her as he caught up with her at the mouth of Johnny’s cave, but couldn’t stop her. She was too fast, too powerful. But Wolfe figured out quickly where she was going. Brightwind’s cabin. Shit.
But Johnny was there. Alan felt some of the hope that he had begun this evening with return. They had been tricked and betrayed, Spiral Dancers had thrust their ugly snouts into a struggle that was already mysterious and deadly. But Johnny was there. Alex was with Sasha, and despite her feelings she would let nothing happen to her. Johnny could no doubt take care of Brightwind and Lily. They could do it together.
And Brightwind threw that confidence back in Alan’s face. Over the centuries, Alan had spent a great deal of time with Black Johnny. His sire, his teacher, the man who had taught him such control that in a century and a half, a pair of wolf’s eyes were the only mark of the beast upon Alan. He had gone through periods of paternal affection, craving approval and love. There had been bitterness as well for all the times that the older Gangrel rejected his affection, even anger because the elder had embraced him and stolen his life. But when Brightwind, the psychotic Indian, began to order the proud elder, and he began to slink like a beaten dog towards Wolfe, he felt real pain.
Maybe not a father, but a teacher. A mentor. Now he turned at Brightwind’s command – who was blood-bound to Johnny, who shouldn’t have been able to dominate him – and leapt at Alan. His jaws slammed into Alan’s gut, fangs crushing, snapping bone and gouging flesh. Wolfe threw his sire away and lowered his gun.
Practically, he doubted that a double-barreled shotgun could hurt Johnny, even at close range, but he wasn’t sure he could shoot his Athro regardless. But the straight fact was that he was no match for the ancient Gangrel. Wolfe threw himself back, fumbling out his zippo, and lit the refuse of Brightwind’s cabin alight.
The flames may hold Johnny back, even send him away and Brightwind would have to face them as well. Maybe he would even burn to death in the conflagration. Holding his torn stomach, Alan saw that half his plan worked. The lupine look of misery was erased from Johnny’s face as primal fear took over. He turned and leapt away from the rising fire, hurtling his monstrous animal body into the flimsy rear wall of the cabin. Wood and earth tore and the elder ran into the night. Alan silently apologized, knowing that Johnny would be forever marked by his frenzy tonight, and that sign of the beast was Alan’s fault.
Good. He was safe, and he couldn’t be controlled by Brightwind. If the elder was wise, he would stay away until Brightwind was dead so that he couldn’t be commanded. Alan hoped like hell that Johnny backed out. But Brightwind was still there, braving the flames at began to flicker between them.
Alan grimaced. Bullets and knives he could shrug off and heal easily, but there was something about fang and claw, those of vampires or lupines, that struck to the marrow, to the soul. Blood actually welled up from the wound, soaking the shreds of his white t-shirt, but he gripped his shotgun tightly. Brightwind was one step from being an animal and had much more to fear from the flames than Alan did. Even wounded he had an edge.
But Alan wasn’t stupid. It was a new moon, and the darkness could hide any trick. Alan scuffed his right foot, making it look like he was only widening his stance, but also clearing accumulated bones and debris from the ground in the doorway. If Brightwind gained the upper hand, Wolfe could retreat below the earth and let Brightwind face the flames alone.
The crazed Shaman turned and ran. He ducked through the hole Johnny had made, letting the fire claim his ramshackle dwelling. He’d only build another. Wolfe was disappointed that his flight was calculated, not frenzied. It meant that he chose to leave because he had other plans, or because he thought that someone or something else would take care of Alan.
Lily! She should still be some distance behind him, maybe five or ten minutes. But smoke was rising into the black sky and flames threw light into the forest around them. She’d see the fire and come faster, abandoning her efforts to shake possible trackers.
She came soon enough, not on four legs but two – though not as the beautiful older woman Alan had met the night before. She stood over eight feet tall, slim and feral like that Egyptian god of the dead. Her black coat was mangy and ragged and she raked the clearing with her sickly green gaze.
The fire held her attention long enough, the acrid smoke chocking her nostrils. Wolfe moved up as close behind her as he could, shotgun held out. He should have killed her and done a service to Gaia, the garou and all of Valerton. But she was still Sasha’s mother… he couldn’t hurt her that way.
How do you stop a creature like this without killing it? Wolfe wasn’t even sure any longer if he could kill her. He raised his shotgun only an arm’s length behind her, leveled the gun at her waist. Hopefully it would be enough to stop her, but not kill her. It was.
The boom echoed into the night. She howled in agony as the shot tore through her, ripping a hole in her belly that Alan could have thrust his arm through. She toppled forward, changing as she fell. He turned her over, a tattooed older woman, looking so much more like her daughter now that unconsciousness had robbed her features of her perpetual cold scowl. The hole in her stomach gaped and seeped blood into the earth. Alan wrapped his already bloodied jacket around her waist. She bled and she breathed, if only barely. God, these creatures were tough. Gaia built her defenders strong.
An owl carried a message back to Sasha and Alex and brought them to him, and together they made their way back to Johnny’s cave. Wolfe was nervous being there, a place where it would be only too easy for Johnny, Brightwind, or Lily’s pack, if she had one, to find them. But no matter how Brightwind had escaped the blood-bond or gained control over his sire, Alan was still sure that he could not walk freely under the sun.
So they slept, while Lily lay unconscious, gravely wounded, but astoundingly recovering and not declining, and Sasha kept watch.
A Black Spiral Dancer pack might be out there, waiting for Lily to return with the full prophecy. Someone had messed with Johnny’s mind, and the only people powerful enough to do so where Prince Dorian and the Primogen, powerful enemies. And they still had to find a way to revive the lichen so it could do it’s job cleansing the forest (and Wolfe damned well wanted to learn where it came from). But what he kept thinking about over and over as Alex and Lily lay quietly and Sasha paced nervously, was that if the prophecy came true, he was going to have to sacrifice either Alex or Sasha.
Monday, August 18, 2008
Triangle
Alan Wolfe lay in bed, one arm resting under Sasha’s shoulder, her head pillowed on his chest, spilling her dark hair over his neck and shoulder. He smiled, grateful that as a vampire, his arm wasn’t even capable of falling asleep under her.
Their second bout of love-making had been more careful, but equally intense. Alan wondered if he was going to end up spending four hours a night having sex again. Well, if that was the case, he certainly wasn’t going to complain, and at least he and Sasha could be intimate during the daylight hours when there wasn’t much else for a vampire trapped by the sunlight outside to do.
But what was important were the words whispered into each other’s ears during the act, or moaned out during climax. I love you. Alan had dared to say it to Sasha, and he had been surprised to hear her say it back. He’d expected it to turn her off, to make her pull back and dash all chances of sleeping with her. When a girl asks you to take her virginity only so that she is not stuck with it for eternity in the event she is turned against her will, you don’t expect her to react well to “I love you.”
Only it turned out that Sasha was in love with him as well, and maybe taking her virginity had less to do with the embrace, and more to do with love. He doubted that Alex would understand.
And that was something to consider. The elder Ventrue seemed….infatuated with Alan. Or maybe obsessed was the word. The word Wolfe would have used was love, except that Alex fanatically denied it, and professed that she was incapable of love. She had even offered to share the blood bond, an act that would put her in Alan’s power as much as it would place him in hers. But still, she all but vowed that she would have Alan, and that she would wait only so long before she….well, he wasn’t sure. Take steps is what she’d said, but he wasn’t sure what that meant. Would she blood bind him by force? Was she willing to dominate him into being her lover? Would she lever his life boon into the same kind of service that he tangled them in sweaty sheets for the last month?
The one thing he was sure she wouldn’t do was kill Sasha. She knew it would hurt Alan, and it seemed that she wasn’t willing to do that. In fact, she was going to have to work with her.
Alan was too independent to go on blind faith where this prophecy was concerned, but he’d been raised on stories foretelling the Apocalypse and featuring the wisdom of spirit guides. Besides, he was a vampire, and vampires weren’t supposed to exist any more than werewolves or the mysterious power of fate. And there had been two women helping him since the Red Robin returned, just as Brightwind had told Johnny there would be.
Alex listened as Alan spun the tale, adding flourishes of detail and description that weren’t truly necessary, but that Wolfe tended to provide when the moon was gibbous. She agreed to go over Sasha’s notes, and he watched with no small amount of tension as the two women converse in terms so scientific as to be another language. Alex looked down on Sasha as an insignificant mortal, unworthy of notice, and as competition for Alan’s affection. Sasha disapproved of Alex, maybe even feared her as an inhuman monster and a manipulator. But damn if they didn’t work together well. Alan was embarrassed and ashamed that it occasionally spun his thoughts along unsavory lines. Alex had asked him if he would take them both into bed with him. If they worked together half as well in bed as they had in the lab… Alan had shaken his head to banish the thought. It wasn’t like him, a testament to the desirability of the two women.
But he was happy. Content. For the first time in more than a century he was not alone. He had love again. Since discovering that he was lonely the ache had grown more and more powerful, until Alan thought that it might be the death of him more than any Kindred plot. Sasha shifted beside him, throwing a long naked leg over his and pulling herself more tightly against him. He curled his arm around her, holding her close and kissed the top of her head. “I love you,” he whispered to her, even though she couldn’t hear him.
He wondered if this was a part of the prophecy. If it was in his destiny to fall in love with Sasha and to be with her, then he would embrace that destiny fully.
Their second bout of love-making had been more careful, but equally intense. Alan wondered if he was going to end up spending four hours a night having sex again. Well, if that was the case, he certainly wasn’t going to complain, and at least he and Sasha could be intimate during the daylight hours when there wasn’t much else for a vampire trapped by the sunlight outside to do.
But what was important were the words whispered into each other’s ears during the act, or moaned out during climax. I love you. Alan had dared to say it to Sasha, and he had been surprised to hear her say it back. He’d expected it to turn her off, to make her pull back and dash all chances of sleeping with her. When a girl asks you to take her virginity only so that she is not stuck with it for eternity in the event she is turned against her will, you don’t expect her to react well to “I love you.”
Only it turned out that Sasha was in love with him as well, and maybe taking her virginity had less to do with the embrace, and more to do with love. He doubted that Alex would understand.
And that was something to consider. The elder Ventrue seemed….infatuated with Alan. Or maybe obsessed was the word. The word Wolfe would have used was love, except that Alex fanatically denied it, and professed that she was incapable of love. She had even offered to share the blood bond, an act that would put her in Alan’s power as much as it would place him in hers. But still, she all but vowed that she would have Alan, and that she would wait only so long before she….well, he wasn’t sure. Take steps is what she’d said, but he wasn’t sure what that meant. Would she blood bind him by force? Was she willing to dominate him into being her lover? Would she lever his life boon into the same kind of service that he tangled them in sweaty sheets for the last month?
The one thing he was sure she wouldn’t do was kill Sasha. She knew it would hurt Alan, and it seemed that she wasn’t willing to do that. In fact, she was going to have to work with her.
Alan was too independent to go on blind faith where this prophecy was concerned, but he’d been raised on stories foretelling the Apocalypse and featuring the wisdom of spirit guides. Besides, he was a vampire, and vampires weren’t supposed to exist any more than werewolves or the mysterious power of fate. And there had been two women helping him since the Red Robin returned, just as Brightwind had told Johnny there would be.
Alex listened as Alan spun the tale, adding flourishes of detail and description that weren’t truly necessary, but that Wolfe tended to provide when the moon was gibbous. She agreed to go over Sasha’s notes, and he watched with no small amount of tension as the two women converse in terms so scientific as to be another language. Alex looked down on Sasha as an insignificant mortal, unworthy of notice, and as competition for Alan’s affection. Sasha disapproved of Alex, maybe even feared her as an inhuman monster and a manipulator. But damn if they didn’t work together well. Alan was embarrassed and ashamed that it occasionally spun his thoughts along unsavory lines. Alex had asked him if he would take them both into bed with him. If they worked together half as well in bed as they had in the lab… Alan had shaken his head to banish the thought. It wasn’t like him, a testament to the desirability of the two women.
But he was happy. Content. For the first time in more than a century he was not alone. He had love again. Since discovering that he was lonely the ache had grown more and more powerful, until Alan thought that it might be the death of him more than any Kindred plot. Sasha shifted beside him, throwing a long naked leg over his and pulling herself more tightly against him. He curled his arm around her, holding her close and kissed the top of her head. “I love you,” he whispered to her, even though she couldn’t hear him.
He wondered if this was a part of the prophecy. If it was in his destiny to fall in love with Sasha and to be with her, then he would embrace that destiny fully.
Sunday, August 10, 2008
The Embrace
Alan Wolfe lay on the couch in his apartment, troubled. When he had returned, for once as promised, the door to the bedroom was locked and Sasha was sleeping on the other side. He didn't realize until he tried the door that he had expected to find, not only Sasha waiting for him, but that they would wind up sharing the bed again.
He was becoming more than a little used to having someone by his side during the daylight hours. In the past week, this was the first night he had slept alone. Alex suspected what he was only just realizing; that his feeling for Sasha were growing.
And into this mix of feelings Wolfe found out that the Brujah have a claim on Sasha, that with the Prince's blessing, they could take her and embrace her at any time. Alan wasn't sure if he wanted to Embrace Sasha, but when he had thought about it, he had always seen her as a Gangrel. He had always thought that if she became Kindred, that he would be her sire.
There was business ahead, serious business. But when it was done, he was going to have to face the Brujah and fight for Sasha...unless she wanted it. Alan didn't want to begin to think of what he would do then...
He was becoming more than a little used to having someone by his side during the daylight hours. In the past week, this was the first night he had slept alone. Alex suspected what he was only just realizing; that his feeling for Sasha were growing.
And into this mix of feelings Wolfe found out that the Brujah have a claim on Sasha, that with the Prince's blessing, they could take her and embrace her at any time. Alan wasn't sure if he wanted to Embrace Sasha, but when he had thought about it, he had always seen her as a Gangrel. He had always thought that if she became Kindred, that he would be her sire.
There was business ahead, serious business. But when it was done, he was going to have to face the Brujah and fight for Sasha...unless she wanted it. Alan didn't want to begin to think of what he would do then...
Saturday, August 2, 2008
Sheriff
Alan Wolfe woke in Alexandria’s bed. Spending the daylight hours with the Venture elder was happening occasionally now. On those nights when the elder vampire showed her hidden humanity at least. And so he woke her pleasantly and they spent the next hours in bed.
Alex left him earlier than she usually did, a meeting with her father the prince waiting for her. And Alan was to be much of the subject of that meeting. Alan drove with her, the new moon casting no light on the road and turning Alan mischievous. Alex was more than willing to be naughty herself as she bent over on the seat and lifted her skirt. They had to be quick, but Alan entered her and spent in her ass, something she wanted to feel during her meeting with the prince of the city.
Alan returned to her home and collected his motorcycle so he could visit Sasha. The college girl was healing well, though in his opinion she moved around far too much for someone whose ribs were cracked. Janice was away, giving them time to be together, under the impression that they were a couple, but it gave them the privacy to talk of things that shouldn’t be overheard.
Wolfe filled her in on everything that was happening, smiling to himself at the joke that fate was playing on him. Here he was a vampire of more than a century and his one friend and confidant was a mortal school girl. He was feeling in a bantering mood, making jokes with Sasha. Each new moon he always felt a little wild, a little like breaking the rules and testing limits. But he had never had anyone to share that mood with.
Sasha wanted to get back to work on the Robin Red problem, and though Alan wasn’t in a working mood, he took her back to the apartment that had become her lab. Besides, it would give Janice the right idea. Alan was feeling mischievous again.
Whatever might have happened was dashed when Alan slowed to go through a blinking yellow light at an intersection. This late at night there were no reds and if he hadn’t have had a passenger with broken ribs on the back of his cycle he wouldn’t have bothered slowing, but the drop in engine noise brought him a sound. Wolfe killed the engine and focused his hearing, holding a hand up to Sahsa to keep her from talking. Her heartbeat was loud enough to make hearing difficult anyways.
There were voices and the slight scraping noise of glass grating on the ground. Alan dismounted, a premonition that had nothing to do with the enhanced senses of Auspex urging him to investigate. He had a hunch that he was catching the bombers in the act. He took only a moment to wonder why every time he road his bike through this town his path took him across this trouble, but at least it gave him a chance to stop it. He ordered Sasha to leave, his own voice booming in his enhanced hearing.
He closed his eyes briefly, calling up his blood to change. It was such a greater change than shaping his fingers into claws, but he was grateful for Johnny’s instruction. When he opened his eyes, ironically, they were the only thing that hadn’t changed. As a great gray wolf, he bounded away, sharpening senses that were already so much more powerful than human’s.
Alan’s hunch was right. A group of men, smelling of vampiric blood, but not their own, were taking what could only be a bomb from a pack. He snarled. Wolfe wasn’t going to let another building get blown up. He leapt into them, growling and biting. He took the one with the bomb first, crushing his windpipe in his jaws and then flinging him to the floor. Blows rained down on him and one of them men pulled a gun.
Wolfe let his blood flow into his body, lending his muscles and nerves supernatural power. Blows and bullets alike struck his pelt without slowing him as he snapped and bit, crushing ribs, wrists, legs. A crowbar struck his flank and the hooked end bit into him, striking deeper than even the bullet that hit his skull. He staggered under the blow, then turned and bit through his femoral artery, tossing him over his shoulder with a jerk of his head.
The last man fled. A prisoner. Alan caught him on the pavement outside and sank his fangs into the ghoul’s calf. He cried out and dropped to the ground. Alan used the man’s own belt as a tourniquet, but glanced up, snarling as someone else approached. It was Sasha, disobeying him. He might have yelled at her another time, she had promised to trust his judgment, to listen to his warnings and to make his job protecting her easier, but in the dark of the moon it was hard for him to give her any more than a token chastisement.
As it was, for all his need to protect her, he was going to have to send her on to his apartment on foot and by herself while he took the captive to the Alex for medical attention. He called the elder Ventrue and almost laughed when she finally picked up. He was most likely interrupting her and her father discussing Alan doing this very job. Well, maybe it would just seal the deal.
At Alex’s advice he called the Nosferatu to clean up the mess and then took his wounded captive to her manor. He explained what happened while the man writhed on a tarp on the floor and the Ventrue woman sutured the torn arteries and bandaged him. She stood to leave and told Alan that questioning the man was up to him. Wolfe swallowed, knowing this wouldn’t be easy. He asked her to stay, her own powers were far greater and would be useful in the questioning.
Not that it meant much. The man knew nothing. He was given this task by a man he couldn’t remember, and given the blood that made him a ghoul by a man he couldn’t remember. Alex nodded. The man’s memories had been ruthlessly and effectively erased. There was not enough left to reconstruct anything.
But perhaps there was something to find out from the dead and from the bomb. Sage was clearing away the bodies, erasing the evidence of what had happened there. In an hour or two, it would look like nothing more than a harmless break-in. But the bomb was gone. Alan cursed, but took the rest of their possessions, hoping there would be a clue there.
As it turned out, Wolfe didn’t have to look far to find the bomb. Sasha had been naughty again and had taken the bomb from the scene. Alan was annoyed, but couldn’t muster the indignation to chide her for breaking rules tonight. Besides, she knew enough chemistry that she might be able to tell him something about the bomb. Sadly, the only thing she could tell was something Alan’s nose discovered already; the bomb included fertilizers.
Alan’s phone rang and Alex’s cool voice requested his presence to meet the Prince of Valerton. He collected the bomb and the map that the ghouls had been following. The ancient Ventrue has resources and powers that Alan didn’t, and these may be valuable clues after all.
He put them in the Princes hands when he arrived, but he began to doubt. The Prince had done little so far to stop this threat and entrusting him with the evidence of it may not get them anywhere. Wolfe wondered again why Dorian would work so hard to stop this from being investigated, even going so far as to change his memories.
But one good thing did come out of it. Perhaps Alex had already persuaded him, perhaps he had wisely chosen to follow the lead of the primogen, or maybe it had been as Alan mused, that interrupting to say that he had caught the bombers had finally been the argument that led Dorian to ask Alan to be Valerton’s enforcer.
Alex walked out with him, favoring him with an almost human smile. When she asked him to celebrate with her, he was tempted. Wolfe liked her best in these moods, but Sasha was waiting. Too many times he’d had to put her off. He felt like he needed her company now, even more than Alex’s companionship. While the elder vampire was sometimes capable of being his friend, Sasha always was.
He left her with a promise to spend all of the following night celebrating. He wondered if there was going to be a party, or if any of the kindred were going to want to meet with the new Sheriff, if it was even going to be announced. But he left those thoughts for tomorrow and sped back to his apartment where Sasha was waiting.
Alex left him earlier than she usually did, a meeting with her father the prince waiting for her. And Alan was to be much of the subject of that meeting. Alan drove with her, the new moon casting no light on the road and turning Alan mischievous. Alex was more than willing to be naughty herself as she bent over on the seat and lifted her skirt. They had to be quick, but Alan entered her and spent in her ass, something she wanted to feel during her meeting with the prince of the city.
Alan returned to her home and collected his motorcycle so he could visit Sasha. The college girl was healing well, though in his opinion she moved around far too much for someone whose ribs were cracked. Janice was away, giving them time to be together, under the impression that they were a couple, but it gave them the privacy to talk of things that shouldn’t be overheard.
Wolfe filled her in on everything that was happening, smiling to himself at the joke that fate was playing on him. Here he was a vampire of more than a century and his one friend and confidant was a mortal school girl. He was feeling in a bantering mood, making jokes with Sasha. Each new moon he always felt a little wild, a little like breaking the rules and testing limits. But he had never had anyone to share that mood with.
Sasha wanted to get back to work on the Robin Red problem, and though Alan wasn’t in a working mood, he took her back to the apartment that had become her lab. Besides, it would give Janice the right idea. Alan was feeling mischievous again.
Whatever might have happened was dashed when Alan slowed to go through a blinking yellow light at an intersection. This late at night there were no reds and if he hadn’t have had a passenger with broken ribs on the back of his cycle he wouldn’t have bothered slowing, but the drop in engine noise brought him a sound. Wolfe killed the engine and focused his hearing, holding a hand up to Sahsa to keep her from talking. Her heartbeat was loud enough to make hearing difficult anyways.
There were voices and the slight scraping noise of glass grating on the ground. Alan dismounted, a premonition that had nothing to do with the enhanced senses of Auspex urging him to investigate. He had a hunch that he was catching the bombers in the act. He took only a moment to wonder why every time he road his bike through this town his path took him across this trouble, but at least it gave him a chance to stop it. He ordered Sasha to leave, his own voice booming in his enhanced hearing.
He closed his eyes briefly, calling up his blood to change. It was such a greater change than shaping his fingers into claws, but he was grateful for Johnny’s instruction. When he opened his eyes, ironically, they were the only thing that hadn’t changed. As a great gray wolf, he bounded away, sharpening senses that were already so much more powerful than human’s.
Alan’s hunch was right. A group of men, smelling of vampiric blood, but not their own, were taking what could only be a bomb from a pack. He snarled. Wolfe wasn’t going to let another building get blown up. He leapt into them, growling and biting. He took the one with the bomb first, crushing his windpipe in his jaws and then flinging him to the floor. Blows rained down on him and one of them men pulled a gun.
Wolfe let his blood flow into his body, lending his muscles and nerves supernatural power. Blows and bullets alike struck his pelt without slowing him as he snapped and bit, crushing ribs, wrists, legs. A crowbar struck his flank and the hooked end bit into him, striking deeper than even the bullet that hit his skull. He staggered under the blow, then turned and bit through his femoral artery, tossing him over his shoulder with a jerk of his head.
The last man fled. A prisoner. Alan caught him on the pavement outside and sank his fangs into the ghoul’s calf. He cried out and dropped to the ground. Alan used the man’s own belt as a tourniquet, but glanced up, snarling as someone else approached. It was Sasha, disobeying him. He might have yelled at her another time, she had promised to trust his judgment, to listen to his warnings and to make his job protecting her easier, but in the dark of the moon it was hard for him to give her any more than a token chastisement.
As it was, for all his need to protect her, he was going to have to send her on to his apartment on foot and by herself while he took the captive to the Alex for medical attention. He called the elder Ventrue and almost laughed when she finally picked up. He was most likely interrupting her and her father discussing Alan doing this very job. Well, maybe it would just seal the deal.
At Alex’s advice he called the Nosferatu to clean up the mess and then took his wounded captive to her manor. He explained what happened while the man writhed on a tarp on the floor and the Ventrue woman sutured the torn arteries and bandaged him. She stood to leave and told Alan that questioning the man was up to him. Wolfe swallowed, knowing this wouldn’t be easy. He asked her to stay, her own powers were far greater and would be useful in the questioning.
Not that it meant much. The man knew nothing. He was given this task by a man he couldn’t remember, and given the blood that made him a ghoul by a man he couldn’t remember. Alex nodded. The man’s memories had been ruthlessly and effectively erased. There was not enough left to reconstruct anything.
But perhaps there was something to find out from the dead and from the bomb. Sage was clearing away the bodies, erasing the evidence of what had happened there. In an hour or two, it would look like nothing more than a harmless break-in. But the bomb was gone. Alan cursed, but took the rest of their possessions, hoping there would be a clue there.
As it turned out, Wolfe didn’t have to look far to find the bomb. Sasha had been naughty again and had taken the bomb from the scene. Alan was annoyed, but couldn’t muster the indignation to chide her for breaking rules tonight. Besides, she knew enough chemistry that she might be able to tell him something about the bomb. Sadly, the only thing she could tell was something Alan’s nose discovered already; the bomb included fertilizers.
Alan’s phone rang and Alex’s cool voice requested his presence to meet the Prince of Valerton. He collected the bomb and the map that the ghouls had been following. The ancient Ventrue has resources and powers that Alan didn’t, and these may be valuable clues after all.
He put them in the Princes hands when he arrived, but he began to doubt. The Prince had done little so far to stop this threat and entrusting him with the evidence of it may not get them anywhere. Wolfe wondered again why Dorian would work so hard to stop this from being investigated, even going so far as to change his memories.
But one good thing did come out of it. Perhaps Alex had already persuaded him, perhaps he had wisely chosen to follow the lead of the primogen, or maybe it had been as Alan mused, that interrupting to say that he had caught the bombers had finally been the argument that led Dorian to ask Alan to be Valerton’s enforcer.
Alex walked out with him, favoring him with an almost human smile. When she asked him to celebrate with her, he was tempted. Wolfe liked her best in these moods, but Sasha was waiting. Too many times he’d had to put her off. He felt like he needed her company now, even more than Alex’s companionship. While the elder vampire was sometimes capable of being his friend, Sasha always was.
He left her with a promise to spend all of the following night celebrating. He wondered if there was going to be a party, or if any of the kindred were going to want to meet with the new Sheriff, if it was even going to be announced. But he left those thoughts for tomorrow and sped back to his apartment where Sasha was waiting.
Thursday, July 31, 2008
Friends and Enemies
Alan Wolfe entered Alex’s large house. The place was getting to be familiar to him, especially the music room and the bedroom. Of course the Venture noticed the dark glasses, everyone would. And they would all know what it meant.
The Gangrel was grateful that the loss of his blue eyes, replaced by fierce yellow ones, was not too disturbing a mark. He would be able to pass his eyes off as very odd, but necessarily supernatural in many cases, though it would bring him attention he may not want. It could have been antlers like Johnny, or like the tails that both of the other Gangrel had. Perhaps it was because he was a watchman, a sentinel, that his beast came out in his eyes first.
But Wolfe was no less ashamed. Alex looked into his golden eyes thoughtfully, they didn’t disturb her. It was her opinion that kindred were monsters, a statement that Alan rebelled against. Yes, they were cursed, but they had free will, and they could choose their actions, their courses, even as Alex said, to choose to end their life and escape the curse entirely. Matters of the soul had been much on Alan’s mind since his frenzy, and he’d spent his quiet hours as the moon dimmed to a crescent thinking about his beast and his soul.
Alex frustrated him. At one moment it seemed that she actually had some affection for him, that she was attracted to him. But the next she said that some other bestial mark would only have been interesting to her, that she found Black Johnny and Brightwind intriguing. Alan was a little surprised about himself that he cared if she was attracted to him specifically. Well, as he was arguing, he was still very human, and humans had feelings, had desires, had egos.
Alex was different, older, and she had lost much of what made her human. But not all of it. There were times when that human part surfaced and Alan actually liked Alexandria, when his desire for her went beyond paying off a debt, beyond the physical attraction to a beautiful woman. And then there were the times when she was all vampire, distant and calculating, and it was only his obligation that forced him into her bed.
It was different with Sasha. She was still human, and she was so alive. They picked up the lab equipment she would need and began to set it up. Alan asked her about it and the bright young woman chatted amiably about the function of each machine and how she was going to use it. For a man who had been educated during the civil war, the actual functions were beyond his understanding, but he enjoyed listening to her.
He was sorry that he had to go back to Alex, as…enjoyable as those meetings were. It was a very different sort of companionship, the two women. Alan even began to wonder if Sasha could be attracted to him. The last weeks had been full of reminders of his living days, living needs and desires. While he had suffered at the hands of the beast had the mark to show it, the remains of his human soul had been fed and nurtured as well.
While it might have been nice to have Sasha stay at his apartment to sleep, he had to understand that it wasn’t well furnished, and he couldn’t quite see fit to complain that she asked him to dive her home, the young mortal wrapping her arms around his middle and laying her head against his back.
What enjoyment there was vanished with the car that hit them and then sped away. Wolfe gripped the handlebars, trying to keep control of the bike, but Sasha was slipping. He reached for her, but had to abandon that attempt to keep the bike from tipping and she fell. Wolfe planted his foot and spun the bike around. Sasha was hurt, but alive, though Alan didn’t get to worry about that for long before the sudden rush of premonition. He didn’t know if Auspex heightened a sort of sixth sense as well as the traditional five, but he was grateful enough as he threw himself over Sasha and flame lit up the night.
They were further from the blast than he had been the first time, but chunks of flaming debris rained down around them, and pelted Wolfe’s back. The Gangrel scooped her into his arms, feeling the strangeness of a mortal heart beating rapidly against his chest, and cleared the area.
He stopped the bike when they were safe. Sasha was dazed and she’d said something had cracked inside of her. He’d been talking to her just before the blast. She needed help. A hospital was the first place to go, but Alan also knew that what would take weeks of healing, his blood could do in moments.
Alan wasn’t about to ghoul her when she wasn’t able to talk about it, so he left her at the hospital. Dawn was close and he couldn’t stay, but he promised to call her and visit if he could.
She’d been drugged when he called the next evening, but her ribs were only cracked, not broken and she said that she would probably be discharged by morning. Alan closed his phone gratefully as Alex appeared in her front door.
The Ventrue woman had demanded eight hours of his time tonight to make up for lost time. It was going to be a real test of his stamina and creativity. By the time he left, she’d know everything that he knew or had even heard of. But when he saw her in a suit, rather than the elegant but sexy dresses she usually greeted him, he knew that there was going to be more lost time.
She led him to her car and they set out to the Gangrel Preserve to meet as primogen. She held his yellow gaze and made it clear that tonight he was not present as interpreter, but an advisor. Alan soon found that none of the primogen, even Alexandria, were pleased at the lack of action concerning the bombings. Prince Dorian seemed unconcerned, and the police and media only seemed to be going through the motions of dealing with the situation.
They asked Wolfe to relate what he knew of the bombings since he has been nearby both explosions, and Alex asked permission to view them in his mind.
Valerton had never had a vampire sheriff before, not under the loose control of the Gangrel, and not even under the Camarilla control of the Ventrue. The primogen were beginning to think that Valerton needed one, and that Alan was best suited to the task.
Wolfe considered that carefully. No one had ever asked him to ride his scouting trips around the city, or to fight off the few Sabbat incursions. No one ever asked him to stand up and protect them, it was just something he did. He did it because no one else was and it needed to be done.
If he became the Camarilla Sheriff, he would have authority to back him up, the power to call on others or to question them, even the ability to argue his mind with the prince or primogen. And if Brightwind lost control again… But it would also place him under the control of the prince and elders, force him to abide by Camarilla rules, and at times, it might also turn him against other Kindred, even his own Clan.
Johnny argued the cons with Alan in private, almost trying to talk him out of it. Wolfe thought that it might be the fact of his friendship with Sasha more than the office of Sheriff that angered him, though. He was not pleased that Alan had followed his own judgment in that matter.
But Alan was able to decide. They couldn’t force him to do anything as Sheriff, just as he didn’t let his sire force him to kill Sasha. Gangrel feet were not nailed down, and there was no problem that couldn’t just be left behind. Alan wouldn’t turn against his clan any more than he would turn against the mortal woman he had decided to protect, and he would use the powers of the Sheriff to do what no one else was doing.
The trip back to Alex’s house was as quiet as the trip out to the Preserve, but this time Alex kept her beautifully sculpted face turned towards Alan, watching him. Her smooth white face seemed troubled, though she showed so little that Wolfe always had a hard time reading her. But the reason for her disquiet troubled Alan more.
As she watched his thoughts, she saw places in his mind where his memories had been taken. Cut out or rewritten like film in the editing room. And not just recent memories either, but someone had taken old memories from before the embrace even.
If it wasn’t bad enough that someone had violated him in this way, Alex refused to restore his memory. Her arguments that it may have been done for a good reason and the implication that she could take the very memory of her revealing the changes to him only made Alan more angry.
He stalked the grounds of Alex’s manor while the Venture waited inside, expecting a lover to return. Tonight, she was the elder, the primogen, the vampire. Even as they made love, Alan was lonely.
The next evening Alan paid a visit to Sasha’s professor, Doctor Marshal. She’d received a message from him, threatening that if she did not go public with her findings about the Robin Red, that he would publish it without her. Until he arrived on the campus, Wolfe actually thought that this was going to tumble into bloodshed. Johnny would not take kindly to the interference of mortal scholars in this matter and it could very well drive him to kill Doctor Marshal and Sasha, yet killing Doctor Marshal might be the only way to prevent that violence. Alan cursed and wished again that he had mastered Alex’s teachings already.
But as he approached the professor’s office, it occurred to him that everyone at the school was under the impression that he was her boyfriend. He thought up the story even as he told it, using as much truth as he could. Truth, he was quickly discovering, makes the best lies.
The professor agreed to wait for Sasha to recover from her accident before taking away her first major discovery, and no one had to die. Unfortunately, Sasha was no longer at the hospital and all records of her had been moved. Someone had taken her.
Alan clashed with Alex over it. Nothing could happen in the hospitals without her knowing and this was too much of a coincidence for it to be anything other than by someone’s doing. Alexandria had Sasha moved to the downtown hospital and had given a sample of her blood to Johnny, who had been able to identify her as a kinfolk.
Wolfe knew that as primogen and as the woman holding his life boon, that she could ruin Alan for his outburst. As an elder, she was well within her power to kill him for it. But it didn’t stop Alan from yelling and arguing with her. After all he had done to protect her, that shield of secrecy was torn away. Alan felt vulnerable and exposed, and angry. It became an argument of the worth of mortals and the fate of Sasha.
To Alan’s surprise, Alex gave Sasha up. While she could have been a bargaining chip, could have been used against Alan or lupines or to curry favor with Johnny Tempest, she just let her go. Wolfe was always stunned to see the human in Alex emerge, but also very glad.
Wolfe surprised himself with how much he missed Sasha, and with how worried he had been. He called David and asked him to meet with him and Sasha’s roommate Janice at the hospital. Johnny and Brightwind now both knew about Sasha and her heritage, though he didn’t think they knew about her ability to see spirits yet. But it was a dangerous time, if it hadn’t been already, and Alan knew that he might need David’s help protecting her.
David was obviously attracted to her, which annoyed Alan. He had no personal claim on Sasha, he didn’t really know what he was to her, but he was annoyed all the same. He comforted himself by reminding David that Janice and most of Sasha’s friends thought that he was her boyfriend.
David and Janice left them alone and even though she was lying on the couch in the living room of the apartment, the evening took on a more intimate air. Alan filled Sasha in on what was happening, realizing just how much trust he was placing in this mortal girl. He was reluctant to leave, but already he had delayed a visit to Johnny for some time. After all the favors and errands he had done for the elder Gangrel, he finally had the opportunity to learn from him again.
His lessons in the powers of Protean and Dominate took up much of the night and it was growing late by the time that Alan and Alex fell exhausted into the sheets. He stroked her damp hair as they talked, and the Ventrue agreed to remove the earliest block in his memory.
They were fragmented and painful, but powerfully vivid. He saw his youngest sister Anastasia in bed at the Wolfe house in Valerton. This must’ve been after she changed. Anastasia was sick, trembling, unable to even keep her form. She whimpered and shifted from woman to wolf painfully. Alan saw the woods around Valerton, branches and roots encrusted with the Robin Red lichen. He saw the forest in flames, red-tinged smoke rising into the daytime sky, birds dropping from the air. He saw himself carrying Anastasia from the woods, the gutted carcass of a deer behind them, its spilled entrails dark with Robin Red. The memories were disjointed and shuffled about, occurring out of sequence and still with gaps, but the overall picture was clear.
The Robin Red lichen had plagued Valerton before. Alan was willing to bet that the other blocks in his memory hid other outbreaks of the parasitic lichen. But what did that have to do with the bombings in town? Why would the Prince alter his memory of that? Had he discovered who the bombers were? But Alex was too tired to pursue those answers now.
Wolfe checked in with Sasha and promised to visit the following night and was surprised once again, not by his own impulses, but by the hurt tone in Sasha’s voice. He’d said he’d return tonight and see her, but had not. She’d waited for him, hoping to see him again. Wolfe had to wonder again just what she was to him, and what he might be to her. Friends? Definitely…he’d even told her that, and it was a rare honor. In fact, she was the only friend he had.
Tomorrow evening he would wake with Alex. He owed her his time and attentions, but maybe tomorrow night would bring no new surprises. Maybe he could visit Sasha and make sure she was well, and they could have an evening where they didn’t have to worry about anything else.
The Gangrel was grateful that the loss of his blue eyes, replaced by fierce yellow ones, was not too disturbing a mark. He would be able to pass his eyes off as very odd, but necessarily supernatural in many cases, though it would bring him attention he may not want. It could have been antlers like Johnny, or like the tails that both of the other Gangrel had. Perhaps it was because he was a watchman, a sentinel, that his beast came out in his eyes first.
But Wolfe was no less ashamed. Alex looked into his golden eyes thoughtfully, they didn’t disturb her. It was her opinion that kindred were monsters, a statement that Alan rebelled against. Yes, they were cursed, but they had free will, and they could choose their actions, their courses, even as Alex said, to choose to end their life and escape the curse entirely. Matters of the soul had been much on Alan’s mind since his frenzy, and he’d spent his quiet hours as the moon dimmed to a crescent thinking about his beast and his soul.
Alex frustrated him. At one moment it seemed that she actually had some affection for him, that she was attracted to him. But the next she said that some other bestial mark would only have been interesting to her, that she found Black Johnny and Brightwind intriguing. Alan was a little surprised about himself that he cared if she was attracted to him specifically. Well, as he was arguing, he was still very human, and humans had feelings, had desires, had egos.
Alex was different, older, and she had lost much of what made her human. But not all of it. There were times when that human part surfaced and Alan actually liked Alexandria, when his desire for her went beyond paying off a debt, beyond the physical attraction to a beautiful woman. And then there were the times when she was all vampire, distant and calculating, and it was only his obligation that forced him into her bed.
It was different with Sasha. She was still human, and she was so alive. They picked up the lab equipment she would need and began to set it up. Alan asked her about it and the bright young woman chatted amiably about the function of each machine and how she was going to use it. For a man who had been educated during the civil war, the actual functions were beyond his understanding, but he enjoyed listening to her.
He was sorry that he had to go back to Alex, as…enjoyable as those meetings were. It was a very different sort of companionship, the two women. Alan even began to wonder if Sasha could be attracted to him. The last weeks had been full of reminders of his living days, living needs and desires. While he had suffered at the hands of the beast had the mark to show it, the remains of his human soul had been fed and nurtured as well.
While it might have been nice to have Sasha stay at his apartment to sleep, he had to understand that it wasn’t well furnished, and he couldn’t quite see fit to complain that she asked him to dive her home, the young mortal wrapping her arms around his middle and laying her head against his back.
What enjoyment there was vanished with the car that hit them and then sped away. Wolfe gripped the handlebars, trying to keep control of the bike, but Sasha was slipping. He reached for her, but had to abandon that attempt to keep the bike from tipping and she fell. Wolfe planted his foot and spun the bike around. Sasha was hurt, but alive, though Alan didn’t get to worry about that for long before the sudden rush of premonition. He didn’t know if Auspex heightened a sort of sixth sense as well as the traditional five, but he was grateful enough as he threw himself over Sasha and flame lit up the night.
They were further from the blast than he had been the first time, but chunks of flaming debris rained down around them, and pelted Wolfe’s back. The Gangrel scooped her into his arms, feeling the strangeness of a mortal heart beating rapidly against his chest, and cleared the area.
He stopped the bike when they were safe. Sasha was dazed and she’d said something had cracked inside of her. He’d been talking to her just before the blast. She needed help. A hospital was the first place to go, but Alan also knew that what would take weeks of healing, his blood could do in moments.
Alan wasn’t about to ghoul her when she wasn’t able to talk about it, so he left her at the hospital. Dawn was close and he couldn’t stay, but he promised to call her and visit if he could.
She’d been drugged when he called the next evening, but her ribs were only cracked, not broken and she said that she would probably be discharged by morning. Alan closed his phone gratefully as Alex appeared in her front door.
The Ventrue woman had demanded eight hours of his time tonight to make up for lost time. It was going to be a real test of his stamina and creativity. By the time he left, she’d know everything that he knew or had even heard of. But when he saw her in a suit, rather than the elegant but sexy dresses she usually greeted him, he knew that there was going to be more lost time.
She led him to her car and they set out to the Gangrel Preserve to meet as primogen. She held his yellow gaze and made it clear that tonight he was not present as interpreter, but an advisor. Alan soon found that none of the primogen, even Alexandria, were pleased at the lack of action concerning the bombings. Prince Dorian seemed unconcerned, and the police and media only seemed to be going through the motions of dealing with the situation.
They asked Wolfe to relate what he knew of the bombings since he has been nearby both explosions, and Alex asked permission to view them in his mind.
Valerton had never had a vampire sheriff before, not under the loose control of the Gangrel, and not even under the Camarilla control of the Ventrue. The primogen were beginning to think that Valerton needed one, and that Alan was best suited to the task.
Wolfe considered that carefully. No one had ever asked him to ride his scouting trips around the city, or to fight off the few Sabbat incursions. No one ever asked him to stand up and protect them, it was just something he did. He did it because no one else was and it needed to be done.
If he became the Camarilla Sheriff, he would have authority to back him up, the power to call on others or to question them, even the ability to argue his mind with the prince or primogen. And if Brightwind lost control again… But it would also place him under the control of the prince and elders, force him to abide by Camarilla rules, and at times, it might also turn him against other Kindred, even his own Clan.
Johnny argued the cons with Alan in private, almost trying to talk him out of it. Wolfe thought that it might be the fact of his friendship with Sasha more than the office of Sheriff that angered him, though. He was not pleased that Alan had followed his own judgment in that matter.
But Alan was able to decide. They couldn’t force him to do anything as Sheriff, just as he didn’t let his sire force him to kill Sasha. Gangrel feet were not nailed down, and there was no problem that couldn’t just be left behind. Alan wouldn’t turn against his clan any more than he would turn against the mortal woman he had decided to protect, and he would use the powers of the Sheriff to do what no one else was doing.
The trip back to Alex’s house was as quiet as the trip out to the Preserve, but this time Alex kept her beautifully sculpted face turned towards Alan, watching him. Her smooth white face seemed troubled, though she showed so little that Wolfe always had a hard time reading her. But the reason for her disquiet troubled Alan more.
As she watched his thoughts, she saw places in his mind where his memories had been taken. Cut out or rewritten like film in the editing room. And not just recent memories either, but someone had taken old memories from before the embrace even.
If it wasn’t bad enough that someone had violated him in this way, Alex refused to restore his memory. Her arguments that it may have been done for a good reason and the implication that she could take the very memory of her revealing the changes to him only made Alan more angry.
He stalked the grounds of Alex’s manor while the Venture waited inside, expecting a lover to return. Tonight, she was the elder, the primogen, the vampire. Even as they made love, Alan was lonely.
The next evening Alan paid a visit to Sasha’s professor, Doctor Marshal. She’d received a message from him, threatening that if she did not go public with her findings about the Robin Red, that he would publish it without her. Until he arrived on the campus, Wolfe actually thought that this was going to tumble into bloodshed. Johnny would not take kindly to the interference of mortal scholars in this matter and it could very well drive him to kill Doctor Marshal and Sasha, yet killing Doctor Marshal might be the only way to prevent that violence. Alan cursed and wished again that he had mastered Alex’s teachings already.
But as he approached the professor’s office, it occurred to him that everyone at the school was under the impression that he was her boyfriend. He thought up the story even as he told it, using as much truth as he could. Truth, he was quickly discovering, makes the best lies.
The professor agreed to wait for Sasha to recover from her accident before taking away her first major discovery, and no one had to die. Unfortunately, Sasha was no longer at the hospital and all records of her had been moved. Someone had taken her.
Alan clashed with Alex over it. Nothing could happen in the hospitals without her knowing and this was too much of a coincidence for it to be anything other than by someone’s doing. Alexandria had Sasha moved to the downtown hospital and had given a sample of her blood to Johnny, who had been able to identify her as a kinfolk.
Wolfe knew that as primogen and as the woman holding his life boon, that she could ruin Alan for his outburst. As an elder, she was well within her power to kill him for it. But it didn’t stop Alan from yelling and arguing with her. After all he had done to protect her, that shield of secrecy was torn away. Alan felt vulnerable and exposed, and angry. It became an argument of the worth of mortals and the fate of Sasha.
To Alan’s surprise, Alex gave Sasha up. While she could have been a bargaining chip, could have been used against Alan or lupines or to curry favor with Johnny Tempest, she just let her go. Wolfe was always stunned to see the human in Alex emerge, but also very glad.
Wolfe surprised himself with how much he missed Sasha, and with how worried he had been. He called David and asked him to meet with him and Sasha’s roommate Janice at the hospital. Johnny and Brightwind now both knew about Sasha and her heritage, though he didn’t think they knew about her ability to see spirits yet. But it was a dangerous time, if it hadn’t been already, and Alan knew that he might need David’s help protecting her.
David was obviously attracted to her, which annoyed Alan. He had no personal claim on Sasha, he didn’t really know what he was to her, but he was annoyed all the same. He comforted himself by reminding David that Janice and most of Sasha’s friends thought that he was her boyfriend.
David and Janice left them alone and even though she was lying on the couch in the living room of the apartment, the evening took on a more intimate air. Alan filled Sasha in on what was happening, realizing just how much trust he was placing in this mortal girl. He was reluctant to leave, but already he had delayed a visit to Johnny for some time. After all the favors and errands he had done for the elder Gangrel, he finally had the opportunity to learn from him again.
His lessons in the powers of Protean and Dominate took up much of the night and it was growing late by the time that Alan and Alex fell exhausted into the sheets. He stroked her damp hair as they talked, and the Ventrue agreed to remove the earliest block in his memory.
They were fragmented and painful, but powerfully vivid. He saw his youngest sister Anastasia in bed at the Wolfe house in Valerton. This must’ve been after she changed. Anastasia was sick, trembling, unable to even keep her form. She whimpered and shifted from woman to wolf painfully. Alan saw the woods around Valerton, branches and roots encrusted with the Robin Red lichen. He saw the forest in flames, red-tinged smoke rising into the daytime sky, birds dropping from the air. He saw himself carrying Anastasia from the woods, the gutted carcass of a deer behind them, its spilled entrails dark with Robin Red. The memories were disjointed and shuffled about, occurring out of sequence and still with gaps, but the overall picture was clear.
The Robin Red lichen had plagued Valerton before. Alan was willing to bet that the other blocks in his memory hid other outbreaks of the parasitic lichen. But what did that have to do with the bombings in town? Why would the Prince alter his memory of that? Had he discovered who the bombers were? But Alex was too tired to pursue those answers now.
Wolfe checked in with Sasha and promised to visit the following night and was surprised once again, not by his own impulses, but by the hurt tone in Sasha’s voice. He’d said he’d return tonight and see her, but had not. She’d waited for him, hoping to see him again. Wolfe had to wonder again just what she was to him, and what he might be to her. Friends? Definitely…he’d even told her that, and it was a rare honor. In fact, she was the only friend he had.
Tomorrow evening he would wake with Alex. He owed her his time and attentions, but maybe tomorrow night would bring no new surprises. Maybe he could visit Sasha and make sure she was well, and they could have an evening where they didn’t have to worry about anything else.
Frenzy
Alan Wolfe kept his eyes down as the bell jingled. It was a quiet sound this late at night in the empty store. He walked to the rack of sunglasses and spun the large plastic cylinder.
The explosion. Someone had set fire to a computer store, blown it up with some incendiary device. It was all over the news, but they didn’t know much about it. Usually by now the police could tell the media things like what kind of bomb it had been, professional or homemade, what accelerants were used. But all that went out into the newspapers was the damage done and the fear in the small city.
With Ventrue behind both the media and the police, Alan wondered why nothing was being done to find out what happened and to stop the panic. Wolfe had half expected to read in the news that a freak gas main explosion was the cause of the destruction.
He knew it was more, though. Alan had been riding the streets and had seen two figures come out of a broken window in the store. They had a good lead on them, but Alan gave chase; it was what he did. When he dismounted his bike in the alley next to the store and went up the fire escape ladder as he chased them to the roof, he could smell their faint scents. But for some reason, he couldn’t place them.
The two dark shapes leapt from the top of the building, their leaps carrying them easily across the side street to the building on the far side. As Alan crossed the rooftop to give chase, he had a sudden flash of vision, one of the occasional surges of insight he’d had since learning Auspex. He saw the building erupt into flames just seconds before the bomb went off.
It had been enough time for Alan to sprint to the edge of the roof and throw himself off as well. He choose the opposite direction that the bombers had taken, choosing the cover of a larger building rather than the chance to catch them. He would only have that chance if he survived this blast. He hit the window of the taller building, glass shattering around him and slashing at his face and hands. He rolled into the building and threw himself behind the first piece of large furniture he could find.
Flames roared into the building just behind a shockwave of heat. Everything burst into flame as the fire surged at the Gangrel. His beast roared in fear, instinctually rebelling against one of the only things that could truly kill it, and Alan struggled with it. The fire slammed into him, and the beast seized control. Consumed by fear, he ran smoking from the building.
Alan recovered himself a few blocks away. He had not caught fire, thankfully, though he was badly burned. The supernatural fortitude of his clan might have saved him, although he knew that for a Gangrel he was soft and weak. Wolfe seethed at himself, angry for his loss of control.
But it had happened, and it could not be taken back. Alan selected the darkest pair of sunglasses on the rack and tried them on. It turned his gaze into something hard and black and cold.
He went to the register and dropped the sunglasses on the counter along with a crumpled wad of bills. The clerk rang them up and straightened out the bills. He looked up just as Alan was plucking the tag from the shades and made a surprised grunt.
Wolfe looked at him for a moment with his tawny yellow eyes, eyes that belonged to a wolf, not a man, and slipped the shades on over them.
The explosion. Someone had set fire to a computer store, blown it up with some incendiary device. It was all over the news, but they didn’t know much about it. Usually by now the police could tell the media things like what kind of bomb it had been, professional or homemade, what accelerants were used. But all that went out into the newspapers was the damage done and the fear in the small city.
With Ventrue behind both the media and the police, Alan wondered why nothing was being done to find out what happened and to stop the panic. Wolfe had half expected to read in the news that a freak gas main explosion was the cause of the destruction.
He knew it was more, though. Alan had been riding the streets and had seen two figures come out of a broken window in the store. They had a good lead on them, but Alan gave chase; it was what he did. When he dismounted his bike in the alley next to the store and went up the fire escape ladder as he chased them to the roof, he could smell their faint scents. But for some reason, he couldn’t place them.
The two dark shapes leapt from the top of the building, their leaps carrying them easily across the side street to the building on the far side. As Alan crossed the rooftop to give chase, he had a sudden flash of vision, one of the occasional surges of insight he’d had since learning Auspex. He saw the building erupt into flames just seconds before the bomb went off.
It had been enough time for Alan to sprint to the edge of the roof and throw himself off as well. He choose the opposite direction that the bombers had taken, choosing the cover of a larger building rather than the chance to catch them. He would only have that chance if he survived this blast. He hit the window of the taller building, glass shattering around him and slashing at his face and hands. He rolled into the building and threw himself behind the first piece of large furniture he could find.
Flames roared into the building just behind a shockwave of heat. Everything burst into flame as the fire surged at the Gangrel. His beast roared in fear, instinctually rebelling against one of the only things that could truly kill it, and Alan struggled with it. The fire slammed into him, and the beast seized control. Consumed by fear, he ran smoking from the building.
Alan recovered himself a few blocks away. He had not caught fire, thankfully, though he was badly burned. The supernatural fortitude of his clan might have saved him, although he knew that for a Gangrel he was soft and weak. Wolfe seethed at himself, angry for his loss of control.
But it had happened, and it could not be taken back. Alan selected the darkest pair of sunglasses on the rack and tried them on. It turned his gaze into something hard and black and cold.
He went to the register and dropped the sunglasses on the counter along with a crumpled wad of bills. The clerk rang them up and straightened out the bills. He looked up just as Alan was plucking the tag from the shades and made a surprised grunt.
Wolfe looked at him for a moment with his tawny yellow eyes, eyes that belonged to a wolf, not a man, and slipped the shades on over them.
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