Path of the Vampire forum

The corridor wasn’t long. She stepped gingerly over the corpse in the floor, carefully avoiding the pool of blood slowly radiating from the hole in the dead woman’s skull. “Not her.” she sighed, irritated. She ignored the body, then, and turned to make her way down the hall with Bambi and Nishaa both in tow. She turned her head, pushing the stray hair behind her ear to give her attention to the older Necromancer.

Advice.

She was giving her advice.

It was better than being called weak. Hell. She even heard some praise in there. She smirked at that, and kept walking with her. The three of them together were loud. Subtlety was not a forte of a group this large in this kind of surrounding, their footfalls sounding like thunder in the tight walls of the upper floors of the compound. As they stepped into the wide room at the end of the hall, the door loomed in view along the left wall, a pair of Paladins bursting from the corner opposite. Their naked footfalls were almost silent against the wood, the only sound was the pounding of their weight against the floorboards.

The first to reach them was a man, his broad, naked chest mostly bare of ink. He was tall, towering over her as he came down on her like a falling mountain. The fury in those sharp green eyes was palpable. This was a true berserker. His flesh was like tanned leather, stiff and dark. The scalp of his skull was shaved. Smooth skin was marked and tangled with a ruddy black ink that twisted and coiled in some kind of tribal marking across the scalp and down his neck, spreading down his shoulders and arms to end with a sharp, barbed tendril along each finger. She could feel the power in him, the way the ink seemed to shift and move as he charged. His arms moved with a fluid motion, his fist rearing back to come crashing toward her nose. She twisted, just shy of having her face smashed. The blow glanced off her cheek as her knife rose to catch the man in the throat, blade slicing clean through meat and sinew and, most importantly, arterial muscle. Blood erupted from the side of his neck in a gush, a loud, hot splat splashing across the floor behind her as the man rumbled onward toward the human and the Necromancer.

Even the glancing blow had sent a blossom of pain spreading through her face, the cheekbone, she was sure, was broken. A long split left behind in her flesh began to bleed as she wheeled around for the second paladin, this one a woman. She was much shorter than the Danish woman, and shorter still than her partner. Where the man had been a mountain of muscle, hard and unforgiving, she was soft and pale, her body still untrained. Her body hesitated, thick legs tensing as she pushed herself to a stop, green eyes wide with terror as she saw the man’s blood spray across the floor, splashing against the left side of the tall woman’s face.

Dirty blonde strands, straight and soft, floated into her face at the sudden stop. The look in her eyes flicked and changed several times in the next few seconds. The determination was replaced with a pure kind of fear, terror taking over that bright, grey stare. Just as sudden, she was filled with shame, and self-consciousness. Her nakedness had seemed to just dawn on her. She turned, and ran for the doorway that they had just abandoned. Her soft body trembled with fear and exertion as she sprinted for the safety of the next room. Her blade clattered to the floor, forgotten. The Allurist was on her in another heartbeat, long silky soft hair wrapped around her wrist.

The sudden yank of her scalp caused the girl to yelp, fat, clumsy fingers digging into the iron grasp in her hair as she sobbed. Freyja grimaced as she flipped her knife in her hand, and shoved it between the girl’s shoulder blades. A gasp left her lips, blood splashing from her mouth and down her naked chest. The tall woman leaned down to rest her chin on the girl’s bare shoulder. She turned her head, lips brushing against the shell of the girl’s ear as she whispered something soft, beneath the hearing of the others as the girl shuttered and died. Disgusted, Freyja shoved her forward, yanking the knife from her back in the same motion. Blood splashed the air and dotted her face again as the woman’s soft frame smacked into the floor with a slap of flesh against wood, her head bouncing off the hardwood before coming to rest.

In death, the color seemed to drain from the girl, the roses adorning her ribs and hips fading from a vibrant red and pink to some dull shell of the original. The curly, twisting vines of the roses along her back ending in a point just beneath her waist drained to a sort of rotted green. The very plants that lived in ink along her flesh died with her. The Dane lifted a boot and kicked the girl’s hip. “Useless coward. You shame yourself.” she spat, before leaning down to pull a leather thong from around her wrist. It held a coin on the leather strip, a medallion of Saint James. She had a thousand just like it. They didn’t do their previous owners any better than they had the coward.

She turned, to see how the others had fared. She never heard Bambi’s cannon go off, so she knew that even in the face of something terrible like that mountain of man crashing down on her, she had followed her orders. She saw the blonde pushed back against the wall, her platinum hair stained red. A splash of blood coated her from head to waist, and her weapon was unholstered, but unfired. Her eyes, with the eerie white contacts, stared at her master, her expression one of both terror and awe. The face she usually had, when she witnessed her dance with paladins.

She turned to the Necromancer, then. The woman she had worked so hard to impress. She smiled, and took the card she was offered with a bloodstained hand. She saw the owl beneath her number, and the smile withered away.

She’s one of them.

Suddenly, her efforts were internalized. A battle within herself much more terrible than anything the humans here had endured. She grappled with herself, wrestling her conscience and opinion, working to smash them into submission. This group, this Tytonidae had killed her sire in cold blood. They had murdered her for a simple mistake. She understood the why of it. So did her sire. She had accepted her fate graciously, with her head held high. Not like the fat lump of coward in the floor behind her, who had run with her last moments.

If she had been able to accept it, then shouldn’t Freyja be able to do the same?

She pulled the card from the woman’s hands and immediately plucked her phone from her pocket. The smile hadn’t returned, but she had set aside the feelings she had about the woman’s affiliations. She pushed the number into her contacts and glanced back up to the woman. “I don’t know what changed your mind, but…”

The text she sent arrived in the woman’s inbox.

[COMPOSED TEXT]
TO: NISHAA

Thank you, Nishaa.
xoxo