Disclaimer: Neither Beauty and the Beast or the World of Darkness belong to me. I write this for my own amusement, and hopefully for yours. I've been wanting to write this ever since I read the description of a Sokto in the Bastet sourcebook and said, 'Oh, Vincent.' This story is in the same 'verse as American Invasion.
"So, we almost there?" asked an impatient voice.
"Are we there yet, are we there yet? What are you, nine?" was the amused, though mildly annoyed, reply.
Venus folded her arms across her chest, and huffed, "Technically." She was getting bored, and when she was bored considerably bloody things tended to happen. At least they were chasing down a murderous scumbag. So bloody things would happen IF THEY EVER FREAKIN' GOT THERE!!
Ami Chan turned to look at her at the next red light. "All I ask is that you stay calm until we find him. This is a rental car."
The car started moving again. Venus just sat, brooding, with her arms folded and jaw set, wishing the stupid traffic would move faster. Then they could find their target faster, and he could be dead faster… That way everyone could be happy, well, except the dead guy, she supposed.
"Ami, do you think the victims will be at peace once he's dead?" She knew she'd already asked about ten times, but that apparition they'd seen had been so heartbreaking; she just needed to be repeatedly reassured.
Ami shook her head, but patiently repeated her explanation. "As I said, I don't really know that much about ghosts, per se, but Lucas does, and he told me that taking out the murderer should take care of their unfinished business, which would allow the spirits of the victims to find their rest."
A few minutes passed silently, but Venus started at Ami's harsh intake of breath. "What is it?"
"We're close. I can feel it. I'm sensing that he's almost straight up," Ami said, pointing to a building across the street. Turning onto the next street, she prayed that there would be a parking spot. By some miracle, a car pulled out just in front of them and Ami slid the car into the space.
Venus grabbed her duffel, and was out of the car and marching toward the apartment building before the engine was even off.
As she jogged toward Venus, Ami wished, not for the first time, that she was just a few inches taller. Venus might well be the student in their relationship, but Ami was the one that always had to run to keep up.
"Just point me at him and stand back," Venus growled.
"Just don't leave any forensic evidence behind for me to cover up. That's all I ask," Ami replied as they entered their prey's apartment building.
Seeing that the halls were empty, they casually made their way toward the stairs.
"You know," Venus commented as they climbed stairs, "It's really not that hard to kill a man without making him bleed. Isn't it the blood that's the forensic nightmare?"
"I really wish you wouldn't talk so casually about killing a human being, Venus," Ami replied, sounding almost, but not quite, resigned.
"Hey, I'm insulted. It's not like I'm bein' casual about the deaths of innocents here. A monster's a monster, whether it's human, fomori, bane, Spiral, or whatever."
"I realize that, but I will keep reminding you that casual talk about the taking of a life, any life, is a bad habit to get into, even for a Garou."
"Oh, how would you know, cat-girl? Just being friends with my mom doesn't make you an expert," Venus snapped.
Ami sighed. She'd thought they'd gotten past that – her being close to Jenny, Venus' mother. She understood that it made the girl feel supervised, but she'd hoped that Venus would accept her as a friend and stop seeing her as the 'grown-up'.
It was understandable, though. Regardless of the fact that she appeared to be seventeen, Venus had only been alive for nine years, and five of those had been spent in near isolation.
Ami had only known Jenny since she was twenty-three and Jenny was twenty-one, when Venus was nearly five years old. The girl had learned to control the change soon after, and had been equal parts terrified and excited to see the world she'd previously only glimpsed through windows. It was a terribly painful thing to be born metis, and not only because their natural form was Crinos, the monstrous, Rage-driven war-form, though Ami was sure it had to be hell for a child to be more or less stuck in that shape until she could learn to shift and retain her other forms.
For most, from what she understood from her study of Garou society, the worst part of being metis was simple – Garou, by and large, despised them, simply because they existed, for that existence proved that their parents disobeyed the most sacred of all Garou laws, the Litany. For one of its basic tenets stated that 'Garou Shall Not Mate with Garou'. For whatever reason, and it was true of almost all changing breeds, if two Garou, or Bastet, or Nuwisha, etc. were to mate with each other, such a union would produce a sterile, deformed offspring, known among shifters simply as metis. Not all shifters had laws against mating with their own kind. Ami's people, the Bastet, had never cared, though it was generally believed to be cruel to inflict such a life upon a child. Of course, a Bastet was also likely to remind you that contraceptives solved that problem nicely.
In the old days, Garou usually killed their metis at birth, and often the parents as well. But, as the Apocalypse began to draw near, and the numbers of the Garou dwindled, the desperate need for more warriors to combat the Wyrm finally served to stop such barbarism. But although they stopped slaughtering innocent infants, most Garou did not stop hating them. The Garou look upon metis as having the stamp of Gaia's disapproval upon their very bodies.
Trust the Garou to look at simple genetics and see the disapproval of their Goddess. Overly superstitious idiots, most of them, in Ami's opinion. The Glass Walkers were the only Garou she knew of who looked upon scientific study with anything other than disgust or outright disbelief. She'd met Jenny, after all, in the social science department at UCLA. She'd been doing some tutoring as part of her graduate work, and Jenny had come to her for help in an anthropology course. They'd each recognized the scent of another shifter almost immediately.
Ami's thoughts of the past were interrupted as her sense of their prey's direction began to shift. "We're getting close. What floor are we up to?"
"We're almost up to thirty. There's only a few more. Is it this one?"
"No, but I think it's the next one. We're really going to have to keep this quiet. We won't be able to make a quick escape," Ami said, hoping that the reminder was unnecessary.
"Don't worry about it. He won't even know what hit him." Though she was certain that a quick death was more than the bastard deserved, she knew it was a small price to pay to ensure the safety of the innocents in the building. Ami's constant yammering about respect for life usually irritated her, but Venus knew that Ami's heart was in the right place, and that she probably even had a point.
"And remember to give me time to scan the spirit realm before you strike. A bane of some sort could be whispering to or even possessing this guy. And, if he is possessed, you'll need to knock him unconscious so we can take the spirit out first; otherwise it could escape."
"God, I hope he's possessed. That sounds like much more satisfying violence," Venus drawled, a broad smile on her face. She chuckled, and then began to whistle a disturbingly jaunty tune.
At the thirty-first stairwell door, Venus paused. "Just a reminder, Ami, please tell me if the building even exists in the Umbra this time. You know that time I shifted over and fell twelve stories? It hurt."
"Such a whiner," Ami quipped. "Thought you were a tough girl. I'll let you know, just let me track him to his apartment first."
Venus nodded and opened the door wide enough to look in both directions. "Coast is clear," she mumbled and stepped into the hall. "Which way?"
"Left," Ami breathed as she took point.
As they came to the fourth apartment, Ami slowed. Just a few steps from the door she said, "This is it," and then she narrowed her eyes a bit. "And no problems, the building does exist on the other side."
Venus set down her duffel and slipped out of her duster, revealing their secret weapon. After all, the girl wasn't given 'Venus' as her Garou name for nothing. Ami had yet to see the heterosexual male that could resist five feet, eleven inches of curvaceous, sun-bronzed, blue-eyed, scantily clad goddess. Turning to Ami, she asked, "Is my hair on straight? And are you sure I should be blonde? I look like my mom, well, if my mom looked like a music video slut. And eww to that imagery."
Ami grinned, "The wig's fine. And you may not like the hair color, but he will – all his victims have been blondes. Now go knock him dead, pun intended."
Venus popped her neck and rolled her shoulders. And after hopping up and down a couple of times, she adopted a rather vapid expression and knocked.
"Hi there," Venus said to the very creepy man who opened the door. Turning Valley Girl ditz on high, and swearing to hate herself for it later, she plunged ahead. "I just moved into the building, and I'm, like, having trouble with the, uh, temperature…thing."
She began to run her fingers slowly up and down the door frame, and her voice gained a sultry undertone. "Would it be okay if I came in? Maybe you could show me how to turn my heat up."
The guy emitted a sort of strangled grunt, stepped back from the door, and Venus entered. Just as the door was closing, Ami's voice sounded from outside. "Psychomachiae."
Before the dude could so much as blink, Venus cold-cocked him. "Ooo, knockout," she said gleefully as he collapsed, opening the door to let Ami inside.
"Venus," she began warily. "It's big, too big. I think we need backup."
"Alright, but even if we knew someone in town, which we don't, it could figure out what we're doing before help arrived and just leave and possess someone else. Bottom line, we wait, it kills more people. The victims still won't be able to rest."
And there was that ridiculous Garou nobility. "Yes, but if we do this now we could be signing up to become its next victims."
But Venus just laughed, her nose crinkling in glee. "You know, I've noticed that you only like fights you know you're gonna win. That's so boring. Anyway, you worry too much – you're gonna go gray. I mean, really. Where's your sense of adventure?"
"This is hardly my sort of adventure," Amy replied dryly, longing for her field work days. Walking in the dirt, sun burnt, natural beauty as far as the eye could see, that was an adventure. Learning a new language, new customs, that was an adventure. But Venus, who found anthropology desperately boring, could not begin to understand that.
Ami watched dispassionately as Venus unzipped the duffel bag. First, she laid out a two by six foot sheet of plastic, then toed off her stilettos and traded her short skirt for motorcycle leathers and pulled her leather duster back on. Leaning back over the duffel, she brushed her hair out of her face, and almost as an afterthought, yanked off the wig, exposing her bald head. Then she pulled out her shotgun and loaded it, then shoved a couple of extra cartridges in her pocket. Lastly, she withdrew two beautifully etched weapons, an axe for herself and a katana which she handed to Ami. "Ready to party?"
"As I'll ever be. See you on the other side." Ami held out a mirror. Each woman gazed into its depths and promptly disappeared.
Not five minutes later, two figures reappeared on the plastic sheet: Venus covered in blood and barely standing along with a rather large cat, well, leopard, also covered in blood and gashes. Ami, for she was the cat, swiped her tongue across the worst of her own injuries, healing them quickly. After that, she turned her attention to Venus, who was trying with little success to stifle whimpers of pain, and tried to stop her life from flashing before her eyes. For a few terrifying moments, she'd been sure it was all over, certain the beast had severed Venus' spinal cord.
The monster was enormous, maybe twenty feet long and six feet high, a serpentine, skeletal creature with a twisted, psychotic, humanlike face. Each of its limbs ended in razor-sharp claws, and it was covered in spiky protrusions, some like daggers, some razorblades, others curved and jagged, each a different weapon, Ami feared, that had been used by the creature's various puppets to torture and kill.
Even so, the fight began normally enough. Venus whistled under her breath and shifted forms. In the blink of an eye, the tall, lithe human girl was replaced by a nine and a half foot tall, hairless, massive bipedal wolf wearing, incidentally, the exact same clothing, for it had grown with her. With a fierce howl, she raised the shotgun and began to fire into the creature, giving Ami time to prepare.
Ami used the few precious moments given her to focus on her chi, channeling her energy to boost her physical prowess. That accomplished, she shifted to her own Crinos form, that of a bipedal leopard just shy of nine feet tall. She opened her mouth in a piercing yowl and charged into the fray, just as Venus dropped the shotgun, saving the rest of her ammo for later…in case, at some point, she needed to lay down cover fire.
Ami was startled out of mentally replaying the fight when two fingers began to tap a rather annoying rhythm on her nose. She growled a moment, and shifted back to her natural form. "Yes, what is it?"
Venus was staring intently at the unconscious man. "Dude, I think he's dead."
Raising an eyebrow, Ami quickly peeled off her ruined clothing and tossed them in the 'soiled' compartment of the duffel and pulled on a new shirt and trousers as well as a pair of latex gloves and knelt to examine the, yep, dead body. "Huh."
"You saw, I just knocked him out," Venus said defensively, absently chewing on a nail. "Ya think maybe that thing was so attached to him that killing it killed him too? That'd look like a natural, if weird death, right? And, dammit…lost another perfectly good coat to the Wyrm!" she complained as she began to peel off her own ruined clothing.
"Yes, well, without it absorbing some of those blows, you'd be dead now, so…perspective? Anyway, I can't judge cause of death just by looking, but my guess is that the shock of being separated from that thing stopped his heart. That or there just wasn't enough of him left to survive without the bane. I suppose it doesn't really matter, though. Just give me a moment to check the bruising from that punch."
While Ami was examining the body, Venus used wet wipes to clean up a bit and finished changing her clothing. "Dammit," she muttered as she slipped into a light jacket. "That thing did a number on my back. Still hurts."
Ami shut her eyes tightly. She had seen that wound clearly before she'd healed it. Bone had been visible. "I know. You did almost die, you know. I think you've gotten your first Battle Scar."
"Oh well, there goes bikini season. Thoughtful of it, I say, not to have aimed for the face," Venus said in what was probably intended to be a light tone, but fell a bit short of the mark.
It was, Ami thought, not that Venus was vain about her looks; it was really that she believed they were all she really had going for her. And it was generally known that Metis had somewhat heightened sex drives, which seemed a cruel irony as they were sterile. That drive, coupled with Venus' self-esteem issues…well, that had been why Jenny had begged Ami to mentor her daughter. She was afraid that, in Garou society, Venus would, at best, never grow to accept and love herself, and would be lost, living up or down to whatever her pack's expectations were. And at worst, Jenny feared her daughter might become some sort of communal plaything. Ami agreed on all counts, but was having something of a difficult time getting past the smart-aleck teenage exterior to the damaged kid within.
"It doesn't look bad," Ami finally said. "It shouldn't factor into COD at all. This is New York City, after all. People get hit."
"Cool, I already got rid of my prints on the doorknob, so we're good?"
"We are." Ami stood and made use of some wipes herself, cleaning her face, throat and hands, then folded up the plastic sheeting they'd been standing on and put it back into the duffel. "Think it's too much to hope that he'd have incriminating evidence in here somewhere? For that matter," she muttered, "I wonder if he'd chosen a new victim yet."
Venus, in the meantime, was walking around the apartment with her hands in her pockets. It was usually the only way she remembered not to touch things. "Ooo," she sing-songed as she spied the telescope in his bedroom, pointed not at the sky but toward another building. "I get the impression that he was at least shopping for one."
A moment later she gasped quite loudly. "Ami? Why would a Bastet be in Sokto form out on a balcony where any freak with a telescope could get an eyeful?"
"What?" Ami exclaimed, rushing toward Venus. "Let me see."
Sure enough, there was a Bastet, Simba tribe by the look of him, standing on a balcony, talking to a woman. There were lit candles everywhere. The entire scene, with the exception of the man's bizarre choice to hang about in Sokto form, was quite romantic.
As Ami studied the scene, Venus decided to throw in her two cents worth. "She didn't really look it to me, but maybe his chick's a real perv and prefers him in that form. Or hey, maybe he ain't so well hung in homid, or ooo, I knew this one guy, Garou I mean, who tended to accidentally shift to Glabro when he was horny. D'you know if that could happen to a Bastet? Or…"
"You know," Ami cut in, "I think it might just be possible that, if you tried slightly harder, you could be a bit more crude. But you are right, he shouldn't be out in the open in anything but homid form…and you want to stroll over there and check this out right now, don't you?"
"Yeah," she said defensively. "Why, you got some pressing plans?"
Ami sighed and massaged the bridge of her nose. "Do you mind if we check into our hotel first? I'd like to drop off our stuff and catch a shower. I would really rather not show up on that woman's doorstep smelling as though I've been bathing in blood."
"Yeah, good point," Venus relented, rubbing a hand over her scalp. "I wouldn't say no to a shower myself."
"Well, thank Seline for small mercies. Grab the duffel and we'll get out of here."
A half hour later, Ami stood with her arms braced on the shower wall, near-scalding water sluicing over tired muscles. With all her might, she willed it to soothe he mind as well.
But it was useless. Each time she closed her eyes, she heard Venus' agonized scream; instead of water, felt Venus' blood as it had sprayed her face and chest as she lay on the ground, bleeding profusely herself. Too close, too damned close; hell, for a few moments she'd been sure that Venus was dead, that she'd broken her promise to Jenny – getting Venus killed was rather the opposite of protecting her after all. But then, as if by force of will, Venus had begun to rise, snaring the shotgun on the way up. A dozen shells later, the Psychomachiae was dead and Venus had said, "See, piece of cake." Then she'd begun to sway and muttered, "Ow." With that, they'd limped/crawled back to where the plastic was laid out and shifted back over.
Venus' back really had been a terrible sight; Ami couldn't bear to tell her how much worse than a few deep scars it could have been. When the tears came, she didn't even fight them.
A loud pounding on the bathroom door startled her back into reality. The water wasn't cold, but then it rarely went cold in a good hotel, meaning that she'd no idea how much time had passed.
"Hey! You tryin' to turn all pruney or what? Come on, let's plow!"
Ami obligingly shut off the water and began to towel off, ignoring the whining Venus was doing about having to wait for her. The girl was still going when Ami finally emerged wrapped in a scratchy towel.
"Just imagine if we didn't have connecting rooms. How much longer would it have taken if I could only pound on your door? You might never have heard me in the bathroom. I'd have had to break in, we'd have been thrown out…"
"Oh don't you ever shut up?" Ami asked irritably as she unzipped her suitcase and grabbed some fresh clothes.
Venus just laughed. "But you move so much faster when I'm driving you crazy."
"Fine, fine," Ami mumbled, throwing on her clothes and giving her hair a cursory once-over in the mirror. Short as it was, it rarely did anything stupid as it dried, but she massaged a bit of mousse into it anyway. "Alright, I'm ready. Let's go do something stupid."
"Whatcha mean by that?"
"Just, you know, that the Simba fashion themselves our leaders. So, lecturing him might be a nice was to get our asses kicked. And almost all Bastet hate the Garou on general principle and wish you were all dead."
"Oh, is that all? Been thinking about this for a while then?"
"No, actually. Didn't have to think about it, I just know it. And I wanted to give you the opportunity to back out. I can do this by myself."
"You're kidding! Let you have all the fun? Look, if you're worried, I can just be distraction girl. I can knock on the door and distract the chick while you do your disappearing act thing. It didn't look like there was too much light in there. Isn't that what you need to do that Night…something…thing?"
"Alright, alright, I can't disagree with your reasoning. And it's called Night's Passage. Just remember, this is a woman you'll be distracting. Your usual methods won't work."
Venus looked insulted. "Humph," she huffed, "I refuse to rise to the bait." She slung her purse over her shoulder, flipped her hair, now a shoulder-length strawberry blonde bob, and headed out.
Grinning, Ami grabbed her own handbag and followed Venus out the door.