Chapter Twelve: The death of a vampire; Birth of a lord

  Millions of nerves ignited inside Kain’s body.

  Black, living sludge poured from the joints of his spine, coating charred bone that bore none of its former weakness. Dark aura surged through flesh and spirit alike, tearing a brutal pathway back to his unholy affinity. It drank deep, flooding his core with dense shadow before forcing it to cycle compressing the sludge into weaponized, profane energy.

  Then the dark aura rewrote it.

  The curse was driven back into him; into his spirit, his systems, his very genome. Purified pathways corrupted. Hunger reintroduced. In his hollow chest, a grotesque heart formed: oversized, over-valved, armored in tooth-like spines. When the aura receded, regeneration began in earnest.

  Axle stood frozen, watching.

  Organs bloomed into being from a liminal nowhere; first suggestion, then structure, then substance as tissue grew from itself. In the skull, red points of light flickered to life. From them, eyes extruded outward, threading nerves into empty sockets, tendrils burrowing wetly into bone and brain.

  Something snapped.

  The trance shattered, and the horror finally landed.

  Axle staggered back as Kain seized; his chest, dragged upright by the dark force knitting him together. His body lurched to its feet, movement forced and unnatural.

  Years of discipline began to erode.

  The compartmentalization. The numbing. The careful distance he’d built to survive. It didn’t all collapse; not enough to change him, not enough to undo what he’d broken inside himself but enough for the world to feel raw again.

  Like the first time.

  Like being a child, watching something sudden and catastrophic unfold far too fast, too violent, before the mind had learned how to look away.

  He dropped to his knees.

  The sobs came uncontrollably, shuddering through him as he flung his gun aside. It clattered across the pallets, skidding and flipping with hollow thuds before disappearing between the boards.

  Black fluid retreated into Kain’s body, drawn back through mouth, nostrils, ears; through every seam of flesh, sliding into the joints of his spine. When it was done, he loomed over Axle: impossibly pale, eyes burning, expression carved from pure, incandescent fury.

  Axle’s mind screamed at him to stand.

  His body refused.

  Kain flexed one hand, studying the long black claws as sensation returned. Through a growing connection to the terrain, he felt what lay beneath his feet; a tunnel system, ancient and vast. An aqueduct. Only pallets and rotting boards separated him from open subterranean escape.

  And yet… he hesitated.

  The shadow-veins beneath him hissed, surging with power.

  It was his.

  Born from terror. From rage. From the incompressible agony of the sun tearing him apart.

  Memory flared into being, white-hot. The curse burning out through his eyes. The pressure. The rupture.

  The moment his vision had exploded into darkness.

  He phased forward and backhanded the boy just as he began to find his courage.

  The crack was sharp and final.

  Axle punched through the shack’s poorly constructed plywood wall, boards exploding outward as his body followed, tumbling end over end before coming to a brutal stop. His head bounced once against concrete with a heavy, wet thunk.

  The pallet flooring vanished. Splinters detonated upward in a violent bloom as Kain dropped through the opening, slipping into the sewer system below moments before the sun could reach him again.

  Down here, the veins were closer.

  They taunted him, charging the air with malicious static that crawled through the underground just a layer above reality. And here… Here he could truly feel it: their weakness. Their thinness. The absence where mass and structure should have been.

  Instinctive knowledge flowed through his neurons.

  This place could not support a true dungeon.

  A stronghold, perhaps. A nest. A wound in the earth. But not a nexus. Not something meant to anchor his power long-term. Eventually, he would need more than the environment could ever give.

  Visions intruded.

  A bone-white altar slick with blood. Hundreds lined up; burlap bags over their heads, wrists and knees bound with rope. The scale of power a dungeon would require was immense, and without the correct foundation…

  Sacrifice would be necessary.

  He tugged on his unholy affinity, forcing energy through his spirit and across the crude pathway connecting it to his spectre, the one his resurrection had forcibly re-established, fragile but functional.

  I need time to fix this, the thought came bitter and sharp. And I need to avoid letting Eidruhn turn me into a weapon of mass destruction first.

  Sickly, green-tinged energy pulsed outward from him, spreading like a divining field. He closed his eyes and focused, drawing his considerable mental acuity toward a single task: detecting even the smallest disturbance in the miniature domain of evil he projected.

  He moved through the pipe system nearly blind.

  His aura twitched.

  Barely a particle shifting; one desolate thread of unholy energy tugged subtly to the left before snapping back into alignment with the rest of his orbit.

  Then the phone rang.

  A second earlier and it would have earned annihilation.

  He reached into the jacket he’d appropriated earlier, irritation flickering as he remembered the rest of his clothes had been entirely incinerated. Only the leather jacket remained, its fur lining reduced to ash, edges cracked and curled from heat, the outer surface blackened. The inside of the collar and sleeves bore a scorched bluish hue, mana-fire having left its stain deep in the hide.

  He pulled the phone free and stared down at the glowing rectangle, unimpressed.

  With a dismissive flick, he swiped Axle’s call away, rolled his eyes, and powered the device off entirely, more than willing to abandon the technologically illiterate act.

  I was getting tired of pretending to be a fool anyway, he thought. Just in case they were listening.

  He phased forward again.

  His body appeared and vanished in violent bursts; air imploding and detonating around him, dust, grime, and forgotten debris dragged along in his wake before being hurled backward by the sudden stop-start violence of his movement.

  The sewer entrance howled wind rushing to swallow the vacuum left by the vampires wake as he vanished deeper into the dark.

  Andrew’s head fell as he listened to Axle. For a moment, just a moment; he’d almost thought Kain deserved whatever had happened.

  Then Axle let one detail slip.

  Just before they left, he’d asked Kain to “detain” anyone who wasn’t them and saw him.

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  Andrew rubbed at the empty sockets of his porcelain mask, pinching the non-existent bridge of his nose.

  “Axle… please tell me why the fuck you thought it was a good idea to give an unholy creature… with a language gap… instructions to hold people who see him. Without context.”

  He stepped back and began pacing, hands wringing as his mind tore through the implications. At present, however, he was still stuck on something far more fundamental: how catastrophically stupid this entire situation was. Out of the twelve thousand variables that could have gone wrong in a scenario like this, the point of failure had turned out to be idiocy

  “We agreed!” He yelled. “You’re the one who talked me out of worrying about people seeing him. You said he just looks like a weird awakened!”

  Andrew stepped back further, beginning to trace long, arcing circles around Axle in the basement. Every so often he dodged a forgotten relic of childhood nostalgia dusty trophies, old storage bins like a shark circling meat.

  Except instead of predatory patience, all that rolled off him were waves of anxiety… and just a smidge of impotent rage.

  Finally, he broke from the orbit and ran upstairs to his bedroom. He yanked open his desk drawer and pulled free a sleek black tray. A small rectangular depression in the wall lit up, the paint fading into a photorealistic ocean vista. Waves lapped endlessly against an invisible shore, so vivid it almost felt like they might soak him through the display.

  Applications bloomed across the surface.

  He tore through them, shoving aside the dozens of start-up programs he never found enough fucks to disable; despite the eternal promise he made to himself every single time they slowed him down during something urgent.

  He pulled up his phone’s account data. Last tracked location: the clubhouse. Battery marker: mid-fifties.

  Did he turn it off?

  No. I’ve had an ear on him all day. He hasn’t listened to a word I’ve said about any of this.

  So what? Did he break it?

  “I really hope not. That was a gift,” he muttered under his breath.

  His thoughts finally began aligning. The alter ego slipped forward, settling over his consciousness like a second skin. A certain sense of apathy followed; coolly, and deliberately placing a careful distance between himself and the chaos.

  His life.

  His stage.

  His hands moved across the keys. Fingers twitched in precise, inhuman bursts, entering strings of characters faster than most people could track with their eyes. A specialized ID slid into the search field, connecting to a backdoor tied to the SIM-card tracking.

  The site buffered; then errored.

  Before displaying a simple connection failed.

  His screen went blue for a fraction of a second a deep jarring neon navy before it blackened and his computer unceremoniously shutting down.

  Andrew didn’t swear this time; instead, he changing tactics he withdrew a deck of cards from his sleeve. He shot them between his fingers in clean, controlled arcs the deck smoothly transitioning between palms. Occasionally a tarot flicked free of the deck, spinning once before landing face-up across his desk.

  He felt Fool’s Hand trigger, magic flowing through his very being and empowering the cards with his special weave of fate, Faceless combining with the Fool’s Mark to boost his divination far beyond what his level should ever allow without some divine symmetry between abilities.

  For the first time in his life, Andrew felt what other diviners described when they reached too far; when a remote viewer tried to look across the planet, when a projector tried to force entry into the astral. He felt the universe push back, the mana resist him. Pressure built in the sockets behind his porcelain mask, a tight, splintering strain as though his face were about to fracture beneath it.

  His fingers crooked and pressed harder, the cards beginning to fly between his hands faster, more and more tearing free of the deck and whipping through the air, yet none willing to settle, none worthy of being drawn.

  Pain flared behind the mask and he felt it deep and unfiltered; as even the protection and disassociation granted by his Mark began to thin. Beneath his clothes the shifted tattoos moved, lines of ink reshaping like weeping wounds before resolving into a single word burned across his knuckles.

  Luck.

  Judgement flew from the deck, spiralling into the air before falling softly onto his desk, face up.

  But as with every attempt to divine the card was one he had never seen, never purchased. Only the archetype was familiar to him, but its details were what Andrew would need. Its devilish details… he thought to himself

  Hands reached upward in the illustration — varying in size, some massive, clawed and swollen, others normal, skeletal, burned, or flayed raw. They stretched above burning, collapsing buildings, fingertips nearly grazing the boots of the sacred figure suspended overhead. Every hand begged for mercy.

  The angel’s wings were black.

  Its halo burned red.

  Its eyes glowed like miniature suns.

  And instead of a trumpet it held some bastardized instrument like a violin warped beyond sanctity, too many strings, gears interlocking along its spine, sections shifting and grinding as it played. The cords did not stir the air.

  They shook the ground.

  Then the card exploded.

  It ripped itself into confetti as though seized by a thousand invisible children, paper shredding mid-air before raining down around him in a pale storm.

  His skill faltered. It trembled inside his soul. His Spirit stat flexed instinctively, trying to wrest control of the runaway current and redirect it, but the weave snapped sideways.

  The divination locked onto himself instead.

  Kain’s signature slipped away like an eel slicked in oil.

  The pressure around his skull eased abruptly. The crushing vice did not disappear, but dulled to an irritant; like an overenthusiastic footballer head-locking him in celebration after passing an exam.

  The cards flew faster.

  They flipped through the air and pasted themselves to his desk in chaotic alignment. Some landed reversed. Others settled cleanly, as if placed with deliberate care.

  A Fool stood alone at the precipice of nothing; no cliff, no sheer drop, just the end of his universe yawning around him. His sack hung from the stick over the ledge of fog, its weight pulling him subtly backward, posture unwise, balance already lost.

  A golden lion crowned with a radiant halo sat content, lapping blood from a woman’s hands as she cradled the beast. Its teeth were hidden. Its claws sheathed.

  A massive spoked wheel stood embedded in black marble, veins of gold running across it like chains, each line converging at the centre where a colossal stone padlock held it fast.

  Another card turned.

  A devilishly handsome demon stared back at him. In one hand it held a coil of chains, hundreds of locks dangling from the links; all open. It stood alone within its card, the sole god of its universe, waiting. Watching. The next card slid into place beside it and the demon’s smile seemed to deepen, amused by the process and by those who believed they were conducting it.

  An old man bearing a lantern stood atop a cliff, looking down at two versions of the Fool.

  One with a dog, one without. The first had a foot suspended above the fog. The second stood rigid within the small green circle of land allotted to him, unmoving.

  Two figures clawed at a stone wall that separated them. In the distance, far beyond, a pair of glowing red eyes watched from either side of the divide, patient and unblinking, observing the desperate lovers who could not reach one another.

  “Well that’s fucking ominous,” Andrew said, voice dry and dispassionate, directed toward the door where he could sense Axle lingering.

  That was all the invitation needed.

  Axle burst into the room demanding answers, the request wrapped in a string of curses and poorly contained urgency.

  “It didn’t really work…” Andrew trailed off, reorganising his thoughts. His fingers curled under his sleeve, veiling the Luck marks in shadow. “I got one card on him. And as far as I can tell, I don’t think he’s hiding or running from anything. I think he’s seeking something out.”

  Axle studied him, jaw tight. When he spoke his tone was aggressive, rude; borderline dickish even if Andrew knew it wasn’t meant that way.

  “You think? Why don’t you know? You usually have a hell of a lot more than this.”

  “Because normally I have seven cards, not one.” Andrew exhaled slowly. “I kind of back-doored it even after getting blocked. Of the remaining six, only four are helpful. The rest are about me. Following the path the first card set me on.”

  “Huh.” Axle snorted. “That’s pretty fucking obtuse, even for your class. “Cool” Andrew shot at him deadpan. “So do you want me to start with the part where I have a pretty good lead on where he’ll eventually end up, or should we keep ruminating on how your marker is so much more efficient and direct?”

  “You shoulda led with that.” He said dismissively, and Andrew started walking back out into his parent’s office as he replied, “I would if you’d shut your whore mouth.”

  Then he pointed over at a stack of sealed-up boxes with the helpful label of ‘dishes’ sharpie’d onto them. “Un-shut it and start going through those boxes, we’re looking for a deed of ownership of any kind.”

  Good god having an alter-ego mind to work on things is a god send.

  Even as the performer spoke, Andrew Prime and Mr. Sardonic sifted information in his head, letting him consider the cards, explain them, and start planning onward all at once.

  “Before you bother asking, go back to shutting up actually; you’ll get it by listening.” He said in a wry, almost drawn-out tone, a mocking undertone threading through it.

  “Judgement in this specific context and representation suggests he isn’t on the run or in hiding, he’s being drawn somewhere or seeking something out, and more so whatever it is doesn’t fall in line with our general powers.”

  “That’s vague—“

  Andrew threw a hand up, one finger raised skyward. “Shhh.”

  “Now the following cards are about me, but they’re entangled with Kain. Next we have the wheel locked in marble, which suggests a system, a structure. Infrastructure and set-up. Something fixed in creation or access. So with that we can say wherever he’s heading, it’s not for a smash and grab, he plans to stay there. So I’m thinking it has to be something dungeon related.”

  He waved a hand, allowing Axle to speak without the librarian treatment.

  “Just keep talking you jackass, I learned my lesson already, no point trying to predict where you’re going after future sight, and I refuse to give you whatever sick high you get from correcting me or leading me around in guessing your divinations.”

  Andrew huffed, clearly a tad disappointed, but he continued anyway.

  “So by the time we find him, he’ll already have somewhat established something, that card is about me more than him, so it’s claiming I’d come to face the dungeon more likely than him. Then we have a sated Strength, which could mean a handful of things but I think it’s pretty broad here; Kain should still be acting with restraint, but whatever he’s going for or will have will come with significant power; which is all to say, so far the cards indicate he should avoid populations and random slaying, and he’ll be staying mostly under the radar while seeking out a place of unnatural power. Then we have the separated lovers. He won’t be coming back and is taking a path to separate himself from me, yet he will walk a road steeped in our history. And Kain has no history here, so he must be going somewhere I’m connected to.”

  Axle nodded along, the pieces starting to come together in his own head as Andrew led him through the cards and what they could mean in this situation, all strung together like the story he was telling.

  “Lastly we have the Devil, and as it’s upright it’s being ironic and quite literal. Where he’s going, he expects intruders. It will be inviting; a place entered willingly, with its consequences accepted. And there’s only one place that’s dangerous, that people enter, that’s a nexus of power not system-given, and is connected to my history… which is also ironic.”