The Sheol Job

[Caliste (DELETED 6204)]

She had been expecting some sort of escalation in whatever it was this crazed harpy was doing to her, an increase in pain and a sharp reply to her insult at the very least. Instead, all she got for her trouble was a complete cessation. There was a brief moment in which Cal remained completely still, kneeling before the woman as the horrid sensations began to subside, and then she very slowly toppled sideways. She stayed on the floor like that for a while, still in a kneeling position, although lying on her side, as something approaching normalcy returned. A slow blink tested the trepidatious waters of migraine territory and found them to be relatively safe.

I should run now…

The thought was the first sane thing that had happened to her in the last fifteen or so minutes, and yet she couldn’t seem to will her body to agree. Perhaps it was still in a state of shock and trying to process the news that night dwelling monsters were actually a thing. Strangely, though, Macaria didn’t seem too bothered about going in for a second attack, content to simply watch her lie on the floor of her shop as if she were a particularly fascinating insect specimen. Now really would be the time to get the hell away…

Becoming aware of the feel of carpet beneath her fingers, Cal’s body responded with a surge of adrenalin and she finally scrambled, somewhat clumsily, to her feet. She wasn’t sure what possessed her to pause, but she somehow felt the need to make a parting comment before leaving the scary nutcase to her bones and powders.

“You,” she thrust a trembling finger toward Macaria, “Are woohoo, lady.” She twirled her finger somewhere in the vicinity of her ear to emphasise the point. “No relic is worth this ****.”

Cal nodded to herself with a sense of finality and turned unsteadily on her heel. No sudden movements. Door. This way. Leaving now. Very fast. She strode toward the door with as much confidence as she could muster in her semi-recovered state, and that was far less confident than she looked.

[Macaria]

It was the comment that did it, really. Had she decided to stay quiet, to beat a hasty retreat without a word to signify that the lesson had been learned, then what happened next would not have happened. Macaria had not thought it through, had no idea what she was doing even while she was doing. She had never really explored this side of her vampiric abilities, instead preferring a more indoors kind of existence, studying musty tomes and practicing her arcane rites in the free moments she got between the various dilemmas that seemed to crop up with startling regularity.

Also, living mostly alone and in limited space hardly gave the chance.

Deciding that if she was ever going to explore that side of her nature then this would be the best possible time, Ria moved towards the door with the goal of blocking Caliste’s exit as quickly as she was able. Which, it turned out, was considerably faster than she could ever have imagined. It was a good thing that along with the increased speed and strength, much improved balance was part of that particular package deal or she could easily see herself toppling rather unimpressively from her feet.

As it was, she made it to the door without incident, hoping that the grin that she currently wore was imposing rather than manically gleeful. Though, she supposed, it could perhaps go either way with the manic grin thing. Especially as Caliste was probably still off her game from her earlier experiences with Ria’s touch.

“I am so very sorry,” she said far too sweetly, “I don’t think I quite heard you. What was it that you were saying?”

As she spoke, she reached out once again and took the thief firmly by the throat.

[Caliste (DELETED 6204)]

Cal stopped short as Macaria appeared in front of her. Damn, she hadn’t even heard the woman move, much less seen it. In lieu of anything else to rationally do at this point, she looked down at the woman’s feet. The heels of those boots… shoes… whatever had to be at least five inches! Ok, so the whole ‘I’m what goes bump in the night’ speech hadn’t just been to scare her. Perfect. She swallowed, her mouth suddenly dry.

“I didn’t say… I mean, I did say, but it was clearly a really stupid thing to say…”

She knew she was babbling, unable to grasp at any words that might offer aid or comfort at this moment. She had found herself in some interesting situations over the years, break-ins that almost went awry being top of the list, closely followed by narrowly escaping law enforcement, but the insanity of this situation was causing all rational thought and any chance of useful speech to run screaming for the hills.

“I like your shoes,” she finally mumbled, the ridiculous statement falling from her lips as a last ditch attempt to appease her attacker.

There really wasn’t much hope of rectifying the situation, but when Macaria’s fingers tightened around her throat it became acutely and painfully clear. Cal let out a muted choking sound as the pain that had been battering her skull now materialised in her throat. It was nothing like the feeling of an infection, that tight rawness of an inflamed oesophagus, it was, she imagined, more what it would feel like if one could develop a migraine in their neck. It ached. A lot.

In a reflexive attempt to stop the unpleasantness, her hands came up to clutch at Macaria’s, feebly clawing at it as she tried to pry it loose.

“Please…” The word was all but incoherent, the vowels lost and the consonants half hidden beneath a thick, rough coating of discomfort.

[Macaria]

Well, at least Caliste liked her shoes.

It was almost enough to make her pause, make up a pot of tea and settle down for an invigorating chat about the relative merits of different styles of footwear. Not that, from the look of her own choices, Caliste had much experience in that particular arena. The best that could be said of the thief’s footwear was that it was probably serviceable. The woman’s boots had certainly not given her any notable advantages when it came to moving quietly around the store she had broken into.

Macaria suddenly remembered what it was that she was supposed to be doing, and it most definitely was not planning a shopping trip in her head. She was fairly certain that she was supposed to be teaching the woman some sort of lesson.

“Your comments about by shoes notwithstanding, you still broke into my shop and attempted to steal from me. Which I find odd, my wares are very reasonably priced. But more than that, you then intimated that I am mildly insane. I find that personally offensive on a rather deep level.”

She indicated the shelving with a sweep of her free arm.

“Besides, what is there in here that you felt was worth stealing? What I have here is mostly just a collection of odds and ends that people might find interesting as gifts and so on.”

In a dim way, Ria knew that talking with a hand clamped firmly around one’s throat was a rather difficult feat to pull off. This, however, did little to make her release the woman. She was, after all, still rather annoyed about the attempted larceny and the personal insults from someone that hardly knew her at all, let alone well enough to pass that sort of judgement upon her.

It was Caliste’s strangled ‘please’ that finally drove the point home and caused her to relax her grip slightly, though not entirely, in the hope that this might, perhaps, find her way clear to explain herself a little better than ‘I got lost’ or ‘the door was open’ this time. Macaria was still incredibly unclear as to why anyone would want to break into Sheol out of all the places available in the city. It was very odd.

[Caliste (DELETED 6204)]

Was she seriously getting a lecture now? With all the pain inflicting and scary warnings, Cal thought the evening was spiralling into a horror story, but this was becoming more like a lesson. And not the ‘Ooh, I’ll teach you a lesson!’ kind of lesson, which she could have understood, but the ‘Sit down and I shall impart wisdom now,’ kind of lesson. It was all made more surreal by the fact that she was having to suffer through it while the woman’s hand remained at her throat, the strange ache unwavering. In all her years of burglary this was most definitely a first – she had never had an intended victim tell her how the attempted robbery made them feel.

She gasped in a welcome breath as the pressure lessened, though noticed with dismay that the pain remained. She swallowed and ran her tongue over her parched lips as she attempted to gather her thoughts. There really was nothing left but the truth, now.

“A relic,” she started, her voice hoarse. “It was in the paper. Missing from a grave site. I thought maybe your shop deals in that sort of thing and it ended up here.” She tried to infuse her gaze with regret. “It’s nothing personal.”

It never was. Cal wasn’t a malicious thief, she simply relished a challenge and any job that promised to be a little out of the ordinary. Unfortunately for her, tonight’s job had proven to be a little too far out of the ordinary, and now she was paying the price. If I ever get out of this, I’m sticking to fat cat mansions and government facilities, she promised herself. Far less dangerous.

[Macaria]

Nothing personal.

In proverbial terms, it was those simple words that finally pushed Ria over the edge. Until that point she had been in control of her actions, for the most part, and had generally succeeded in retaining a cold, scientific approach to teaching this interloper a lesson in why it was a bad idea to break into someone’s shop with little to no understanding of what the ramifications of such an undertaking might be. But… nothing personal? To Macaria, proprietress of the store in question, it was incredibly personal. Not to mention the demonstrably flimsy excuse about the relic.

She was fairly sure that if such a theft had indeed been committed then it most certainly would not appear in any of the local papers - certain individuals spent an inordinate amount of time making sure that anything remotely supernatural was kept beyond the ken of mere mortals. And, she was close to certain, something like a theft of a rare relic from a grave would appear on their radar and consequently no-one else’s. The thief, true to form, was still lying to her.

Macaria did not approve in the slightest.

On the plus side, she had been in need of a mortal subject for her experimentation since Kaleen had made herself scarce, and it would be advantageous to have her replacement be a more pure blooded human than the blood thief. And so she found herself resolving to remove the thief from Sheol and whisk her away to her farmhouse, far from the prying eyes and ears of the rest of the city. Which would be good. Mobs with torches and pitchforks were rarely good for the constitution, from what she had read, and she naturally wished to avoid such things.

Dragging herself from her thoughts, she refocused her gaze on Caliste, her grip tightening once more now that the human had answered her questions.

“I find it hard to believe you, given that you are clearly not to be trusted in the first place. Nothing personal,” she hissed, “On the plus side, we shall be getting to know each other very well in the coming weeks whilst I…”

She trailed off, realising that her grip may have tightened a little too much.

[Caliste (DELETED 6204)]

It was frustrating that the woman didn’t believe her, even when she told the truth, or at least what she thought to be the truth. In all honesty, the article had come through the post, seemingly cut from a newspaper and with no indication as to who sent it. She merely assumed it was a tip-off from a contact but it was not beyond the realms of possibility that she had somehow been set up, lured to this place under false pretences as a form of payback from a previous victim.

The expression that crossed Macaria’s face then was simply terrifying. Up until that point the woman had come across as a slightly batty old aunt, trapped in the body of a rather attractive young woman. She had been scary, certainly, but mostly as a result of the strange power she seemed to possess that was causing no small amount of discomfort for the would-be thief. That, her clipped tone, and her low warnings of the lesser known creatures that hide under your bed certainly amounted to rather a lot of fear. This, though, went beyond that.

Cal’s eyes widened as Macaria re-tightened her grip and hissed at her, the sound inhuman and sculpted like a blade. She did not like the sound of spending more time with the lunatic one bit…

It depended on how one looked at the situation, of course, but thankfully, just at that moment Cal was alleviated of the necessity to contemplate her dilemma further as all choice was forcibly removed and the world went black. It had not been the escape she had intended, but it probably helped not to have to worry about her future anymore.

[Macaria]

Well. That was unexpected. And also a bit of a problem. In terms of finding out exactly what it was her touch could do to a person, it was probably best that they be alive. Or at least able to respond in some way. A flick of the eyes would have done. Without preamble, she released her hold of the woman and pulled her gloves back on. It would probably be for the best when it came to checking for a pulse and keeping the woman alive to experiment on. Which seemed to be a bit of a problem as Ria finally became aware of the fact that she could no longer hear Caliste’s panicked heartbeat. Splendid.

Annoyingly, the area her studies had encompassed did not include CPR or anything that approached medicine. Had the situation called for an in depth discussion of Minoan artefacts or the sociopolitical climate of the mediterranean in the Classical world, then Macaria would have had no trouble whatsoever in setting things right and making her life considerably easier. Such topics rarely helped anything that required a practical knowledge of the human body, however, and what learning she did possess in that area was limited to vivisection and autopsy. Which, as a general rule, both took place after life had fled from the body in question.

She also assumed that what was needed, here, would be a little different than what it took to raise the dead. Which, again, posed a problem.

On the plus side, though, she did have some experience with healing humans with her own blood. Well, a blood thief anyway. What the same thing would do for a pureblood human she had no real idea, but given the situation at hand she did not exactly feel that it could get any worse. Which would be why, with a resigned sigh, she rolled down the cuff of her left glove to bare her forearm.

She gave Caliste a quick once over to make sure that what would come next was still entirely necessary and then, seeing that it was, she sank her fangs into her arm, wincing slightly as they broke the skin. She had learned over time that the maxim ‘less is more’ generally held true and that would be why she only allowed the fresh wounds to drip into Caliste’s mouth for a short time as she held it open.

It was as she had finished this that there was, in fact, a very real, very possible worst case scenario.

[Caliste (DELETED 6204)]

If there had been any sort of awareness in the absolute blackness of the void, Cal might have been a bit pissed off. Fair enough, she had been caught breaking into the woman’s shop and that was a crime and all, so she probably deserved a little payback for her trouble. Hell, she’d been annoyed enough at herself for getting caught in the first place, but murder was just not ok, it really wasn’t. It was entirely disproportionate, in fact. You call the police on a thief, maybe even rough them up a little, you don’t kill them.

As it was, however, Cal was completely unaware of anything. Unbeknownst to her Macaria’s blood was making its way into her system at a rather alarming rate. It seemed she didn’t actually have to be awake or have control over her swallowing mechanism for the thick liquid to slither down her throat and seep into her veins, bypassing her digestive tract almost completely. It washed through her bloodstream, destroying everything in its path, filling it with its own questionable brand of life. It might have drawn a comparison with a cleansing ritual of some sort if it hadn't been so destructive.

Several minutes passed as the Necromancer’s vitae worked its dubious magic before, finally, Cal gave a great gasp, her eyes flying open.

She lay there for a while, unblinkingly staring up at the ceiling in something approaching a state of shock. Quite aside from having no idea what had just happened, it seemed her senses were going into overdrive, and it was freaking her out. Her first moments as a vampire were spent listening to everything she had never heard before and yet heard a thousand times before. The slam of a car door down the street, a cat jumping up onto a dumpster out back, dust settling in her hair… An owl hooted in a nearby tree and her eyes darted in the direction of the sound, the temptation rising to lift her hands and cover her ears. It was all so clear, so loud. It was then that she realised she could see as clearly as she could hear. The shop that had been so gloomy just moments before now seemed bright and vibrant, as if someone had turned on a light while she was unconscious.

She also felt really quite hungry...

“I don’t feel so good,” Cal mumbled. Her brow furrowed and she scowled up at Macaria. “What the hell did you do to me, you psychopath?”

[Macaria]

The next few moments felt, to Macaria, like years. It is a simile that gets used a frankly disturbing amount to denote awkward, pregnant pauses and yet it was one of the most apt ways to describe the pause between Caliste’s mouth closing and her eyes shooting open that was possible in the situation.

In theory, this should have been an incredible interesting experiment. The very definition of what had become the necromancer’s obsession. For her, necromancy was more than just a pathway through her undead existence, it was a deep rooted calling. A song from her very core, the melody ever changing as she discovered more and more about how to return life to a husk it had previously fled. In practice, the sensations flooding through her normally cold, clinical mind were anything but interesting. Were she able to feel the emotion, she would have been in a blind panic, most likely impersonating a recently beheaded chicken.

As it was, she remained kneeling over the corpse of the woman who had invaded her property, absently wondering whether or not she should be taking notes or perhaps sketching out some sort of diagram to properly capture the changes that were clearly apparent in the body that, at a glance, could be thought to be sleeping deeply. It was strange, watching her blood work its way through Caliste’s body. She, at this point, still had no idea what exactly might be happening to her. She was working in the dark entirely, here, only knowing what it was that her blood had done to a living human, a human that had not even been entirely human.

In hindsight, testing what it was that provided her vampiric existence in a more controlled way would have been a better idea than forcing it upon the recumbent form before her.

Still, as the say goes - what was done was done. It was far too late to do anything about that now. If she had been unsure of that, simply watching the veins of the woman’s arm almost seem to pulse as the power in her blood surged through them told her all that she needed to know. In short, she’d made an incredibly grave error in judgement.

Typically, in keeping with that immutable law of the universe named for a certain Mr Murphy, this was the point at which Caliste opened her eyes.

Very little seemed to happen for some time, she simply lay there staring at the darker recesses of the ceiling. Ria had some small degree of sympathy for her, an idea of what she had just caused to happen slowly starting to form in her mind. She remembered her own rebirth into darkness, though blurry in the memory, had not been the most smooth of transitions. Far from it, considering her experiences immediately following that. She resolved, then and there, that regardless of the relationship that might form between herself and Caliste, she would not leave her abandoned.

Then Caliste spoke. And Ria had no real idea what to say.

For a woman normally so composed, so collected it was an incredibly disconcerting position to be in. Experience, though, had told her that when doubt began to make itself known it was often best to overpower it with a flood of truth. And so:

“To be perfectly honest, I have the sneaking suspicion that I have made you like I am. Which, I believe, would make you my first foray into the world of progeny.”

She paused.

“And so we should probably introduce ourselves in proper fashion,” she held out her gloved hand, “I am Macaria.”