We file into the darkened chamber, and take our seats around the dark oak table, a white handprint at its center.
Personally, I think that putting a
white hand on a
black background doesn't really fit a group called the
Black Hand, but I suppose that the reverse, with a bunch of vampires sitting around a
white table, would be just as ridiculous, so I let the logo failure slide.
Wiglaf rises, clad in his dark robes. "My brothers and sisters of the Black Hand. We stand assembled once more."
We bow our heads, and say in chorus, "May Cain's will guide us to wisdom."
I
still have no idea why we're apparently worshipping the first murderer, and at this point, I'm in too deep to ask without looking like an idiot.
"We are four, where ought be five," Wiglaf intones solemnly. "Sadly, we have yet to find a suitable replacement for our… absent brother, and so we must go on as four."
Anna-Marie rolls her eyes and shoots me a glare at the "suitable replacement" line. I'm uncomfortably reminded that every vampire here besides me is decades, if not centuries, my senior.
"Brother Paul, who has done good service and produced many worthy childer in the past two weeks, has called this meeting. Brother Paul? Your announcement?"
"Um, yes. Verily, I…" Paul begins, looking uncomfortable, before sighing. "Oh, fuck this, I was always terrible with Shakespeare, so I'm just going to talk like a normal person, now."
"Ugh," Wiglaf groans. "Youngsters these days. We already translated the rite from Middle English, what more do you want?"
Paul rolls his eyes. "Look. My fellow vampires, we have a fucking problem. The Kine are onto us."
"How many?" Wiglaf asks, suddenly sitting ramrod-straight and wide-eyed. "Are they on track to find our lairs?"
"The local supervillains," everyone groans, and Paul glares at us indignantly. "What?"
"We prefer to just call them villains, or villain Capes," I say. "It…"
"…indulges their delusions of grandeur, otherwise," Wiglaf finishes for me. "They are not larger-than life comic book characters, no matter how they style themselves."
"Look, they are fucking supervillains," Paul insists. "I have been reading superhero comics since 1938. I know a supervillain when I see one. And these guys are fucking supervillains. They wear tights, use codenames, do dastardly deeds, and one of them even has an elaborate underground base. And
I get to fight them. Please don't ruin this for me."
Anna-Marie laughs at him, but Wiglaf just shrugs. "Fine.
Supervillains it is, I suppose." I give Paul an encouraging smile.
"Anyways, as I was saying before you grammar Nazis jumped me, the local supervillains, or at least the ones we haven't wiped out, have become aware of our existence," Paul says. "They're calling themselves the Alliance for Brockton Bay, and they definitely know we exist. One of my childer, the one I assigned to spy on the meeting at Somer's Rock, hasn't reported back in yet. They're setting up tripwires, locked doors, and passwords to keep my people out. And beyond that, I've heard multiple members of the Alliance talk about the Sabbat."
"Damnation," Wiglaf growls. "The Ritual isn't anywhere close to ready, yet."
"What ritual?" I ask.
"The Ritual that's need-to-know only, brat," Anna-Marie interrupts. "So. Wiglaf. What are we going to do?"
He sighs. "We'll have to retaliate, of course. Paul, get your little pack of childer ready to hunt them. Capture if you can, and kill if you can't, but above all else,
no witnesses. There's one exception, though: I want the one named Grue delivered to me alive and unharmed."
Paul looks like he's going to ask why but seems to think better of it. "You're the boss, Boss."
"And what should I do?" I ask my sire. "How do I contribute?"
"Stealth is king, in this upcoming war," he says, brow furrowed. "Thus, Paul and the assorted Nosferatu childer he has Embraced will be the only ones engaging the enemy. However, we must prepare for the day of The Ritual, and on that day, we will need shock troops. Both you and Anna-Marie must build up a pack of your childer and bring them under your control through the blood bond."
I raise my hand uncomfortably. "And… how do we do that?"
They look at me, and Paul grins. "Can I tell her?"
"By all means," Wiglaf says, looking up at the ceiling as if begging God to save him from his ignorant childe's stupidity.
Paul gets up, and heads to the utility closet, before returning with a shovel in hand. He presents it to me solemnly.
"This is your shovel."
"Okay…?"
"I will now instruct you in its use, in the most sacred and ancient rite of the Sabbat," Paul intones with deadly seriousness. "One first devised by our most venerable founders, during an Inquisition raid back in 1503, when they found themselves in dire need of some cannon fodder. It proceeds like SO!" He pulls out a shovel of his own and begins to act out the steps of this supposedly ancient ritual. "Step One: identify the target of your Embrace. Guide them into an isolated location or neutralize all witnesses. Step Two: Administer the Rite of Morpheus with your shovel!"
"Rite of Morpheus?" I ask.
"It's a fancy way of saying 'brain them with a shovel,'" Paul says with a shrug. "I think whichever Elder wrote the whole thing down wanted it to sound more self- important, though, so, 'Rite of Morpheus' it is. Anywho, Step Three: Drain all of the target of your Embrace's blood, and then inject a portion of your own blood into any available orifice, be it mouth, nose, eyes, or open wound. Any port in a storm will do. Please note, that if you don't do this fast enough, or if you're unlucky, the Embrace won't take, and you will have just straight up murdered a guy, so… good luck. That leads us to Step Four: Bury the body. If the Embrace takes, then your new childe will dig their way out of their grave, and everything's hunky-dory. You have a new minion, and your newest minion isn't dead. Win-win! If the Embrace
doesn't take, for some reason, then, well, you were gonna have to bury the corpse in an unmarked grave anyways. Now you've just saved yourself the trip!"
I stare at him in horrified fascination.
"Now, repeat steps one-through-four as necessary, until you have sufficient numbers. I prefer to stick to something manageable, like ten or twelve. You don't want there to be enough of them to potentially overpower and diablerize you, after all. Then, Step Five: Instruction. Traditionally, this is simply a matter of pointing at whoever you want dead, shouting "Kill," and whacking the newbies with the shovel until they get the memo, and then welcoming whoever makes it back alive into the Sabbat with open arms, but since you're going to actually be using these guys for a while, I'd recommend blood-bonding them and then showing them the ropes, like I've been doing with mine." Suddenly, a look of abject horror creeps across Paul's face.
"What?" I ask, suddenly feeling anxious myself.
"Are we…" he turns towards Wiglaf. "Are we turning into the fucking
Camarilla?"
"What?" Wiglaf asks indignantly. "How can you
say that?"
"It's just… we're blood-bonding our childer, and trying to rule humanity from the shadows," Paul says, looking almost nauseous. "
We are acting very Camarilla right now."
"I…" Wiglaf, for his part, looks a bit disquieted. "I… no. We're not… turning into the Camarilla…" He pauses, looking abjectly horrified. "I mean… No. These actions we have taken are rational, measured, controlled. If we wish to survive and rise to our rightful position of dominance, we need to control ourselves before we can control others."
"Like the Camarilla?" Anna-Marie asks with a devilish grin.
"I mean," Paul interjects desperately. "We're not turning into the Camarilla. We're just being smart about things."
"Like the Camarilla?" Anna Marie repeats.
"Oh, Cain preserve us,
we're turning into the goddamn Camarilla," Wiglaf says, looking like he's about to throw up. "And I can't even take back my orders, because it really is the only way we're pulling off world domination. Look, you know what to do, meeting adjourned. Now, if you'll excuse me, I need to go rip a baby in half with my bare hands and lick up the blood just to feel
clean again."
He storms out, and we file out after him, some of us looking more shell-shocked than others.
I take my new shovel with me.
---
"Alright, Taylor," I say to myself, "You can do this."
I grip the shovel tightly as I wait for the E88 member, one of the only ones I could find, to round the corner. When he does, I look him dead in the eyes. "
Follow me."
He does, as I lead him into the empty warehouse Paul loaned me.
And then he blinks. "Wait, what the Hell?"
We're in the middle of the warehouse. I turn back to face him, and smile. "Social experiment. You're free to go."
No sooner has he turned his back, than I administer the Rite of Morpheus, and God
damn if Paul isn't right. That sounds
way classier than "I brain him with the shovel."
Right. I drain his blood, shoot some of my blood into him with a syringe (because
screw bleeding into his mouth, I'm being scientific about this thing) and
start digging.
Turns out, digging a shallow grave is a lot more time-consuming than it looks. In hindsight, I probably should've dug the grave first, secured my Embracee second.
Then, just I've finally dug four feet down, I feel something in my brain
expand, almost as if I'm flexing a muscle I never knew that I had.
CONNECTION ESTABLISHED.
ASSUMING DIRECT CONTROL.
And then, I stagger. Because, suddenly, I don't just feel one body.
I feel two.
I climb out of the hole I've dug, even as my second body climbs to its feet.
I stare at the man I embraced, even as I stare back at myself with his eyes.
I doubt the others can do this, which means…
Memories dance before my eyes.
---
"Joseph," my master says. "In which house would we be most likely to cause a Trigger Event?"
Joseph looks up from where he was doodling on the window in crayon. "
'neath bloodred shingles, the hook will land, and the whale will make a merry catch."
"Thank you, Joseph," my Master says.
"Trigger Event?" Anna-Marie repeats, curious.
"The mechanism by which the 'parahumans' of this world gain their powers," he explains. "When the humans of this world are placed under sufficient psychological stress, they manifest superhuman abilities. I rather thought that we should try to get a look at the process. Who knows? We might get a proper ghoul out of this, and what better ghoul than one with powers all his own?"
"So, you're telling me that, in this world, we can get ghouls with unique powers if we traumatize them enough?" Anna-Marie asks.
---
At the farmhouse…
---
"So, how's Luke holding up?"
Anna-Marie frowns. "Who?"
"The kid from the farmhouse. The one who triggered. Wiglaf said that you were the one keeping him."
"Oh, him?" she asks. "Killed him."
"What? Why?"
"Kept saying he wasn't a Parahuman, and it pissed me the hell off. Turned out, he was right. We did an autopsy, and he didn't have a gemma." She sighs. "Damn waste of my time, if you ask me."
---
Luke didn't trigger and get powers.
I did. And I got the power to
control my own childer.
I wave my newest puppet's hand experimentally, and then use
his blood, and
his body, and
my command of Obtenebration to darken the room.
I can control my spawn. And I can use
my Disciplines with
their blood.
I take a moment to reflect on the fact that I
just leveled the playing field, and then I laugh maniacally with two mouths.
It'd take an army to save this city and kill my sire.
And within the month,
I'll be one.
