Chapter 4: Bite me
Sally rarely felt cause to enter vampire territory. But since Josh was going to be gone in a week, for three weeks, and Aiden was so busy pulling all nighters at the hotel for the eminent Snow visit; the ghost was getting a little bit of cabin fever.
And considering Josh had the rare (And not very inviting) welcome to the estate, Sally couldn't help but quell her curiosity. That and spying on the guests was getting boring. She wanted to join them.
The werewolf had been spending a lot of time with the visitors for the past few days they were around. He was learning more about his transformation then than he had in the four years of his curse.
It was very obvious that Hope had some kind of power over his moods. And a great degree of control over her supernatural senses. Despite being half of her roommate's age, she was twice as cool and calm and collected as Josh could ever be.
Her roommate's agitation over his working week had taken the slow burner when compared to the new challenges that await him on the reserve. Still, the office antics did not slow even if the world surrounding them expanded. Josh heard news from the more inquisitive 'bites' that the British legend that Aiden had rendezvoused with early that week had a housemate of a similar situation. A roommate infected with the 'wolf, living somewhere in Bristol. When Josh asked Aiden however, the vampire just rightly shrugged and said he had never heard of such an arrangement – he didn't know.
But he did resolve to bring it up the next conversation they had.
Aiden and Thom developed an unlikely relationship, neither one of friendship or of enemies. Their rivalry seemed wholesome, and quite natural. Thom, unlike the other two 'wolves, did carry weight the curse much more heavily. The oddness of the burden was no veiled secret to the vampire, who had made it through the last twenty decades deciphering hidden agendas. But no one asked him, and he didn't tell anyone.
He didn't see Sally very well, though she suspected he knew her presence. He didn't seem to have the ability to hear to her words distinctly either, but he still sat still when she spoke. She caught him alone some times, when his anger got him kicked out of the room by the other 'wolves. He'd sit on the kitchen porch, out under Aiden's fire escape, and just smoke his wolfbane laced cigarettes.
He always looked out far away, his dark eyes twitching. He was never at peace.
When Aiden said that he was to introduce Mitchell to Mother on that Friday, no one was particularly surprised that he wasn't expected home for the rest of the week. Still he showed up during tea time and informed Josh that his presence too was wanted at the hotel. Naturally, Josh went white.
But a week after the full moon, and with Thurdur's amnesty and with Aiden's tremulous allegiance with the Boston family, Josh figured there was no way out of it without putting he or Aiden on Mother's bad side. He feared the 'wolf, but Mother was a monster of another matter. This perk seemed to glean an unnatural interest with the vampire hunters, who barely veiled their curiosity by leaving abruptly. Elda returned later with some half finished explanation about how their visit to them in Boston was not just a simple house call, but a mission.
And from what confusing mumbo-jumbo from the old wolf that the ghost understood, Sally gathered they had come with regards to the 'wolf disappearances. Aiden flatly refused to assist them in entering the hotel, something Sally thought was wise, considering their state off of the moon, and Boston's reputation of vampire hospitality. Elda insisted, and Aiden held ground.
The woman left.
Sally followed her a while but hidden, and watched them carefully as they rolled out in their motel room.
For otherworldly vampire-slaying travelers, they packed much like tourists. Hope was playing video games, Thom had an old CD player, and Elda was almost always reading a book. She saw a few wooden items, knitting needles, a walking stick, a bag with two door stoppers. If they killed using wooden stakes, then they did so with a great amount of espionage. Not long after dinner was when Sally grew bored and went to find Josh and Aiden at the Hotel.
Mother was measuring a vampire before her, when Sally materialized into the lobby. A bit surprised, Sally clasped her hands together, and shuffled behind the sweeping stair's post rail. For some reason, she expected this interrogation to have been done in some kind of ball room.
About a dozen or so vampire guards surrounded the meeting. This included Olfaq, a dark-skinned, grey-eyed, vampire with braided brown hair. He'd undone his dreads from last year, and kept neat corn rows for now. Sally had heard him speak on multiple occasions, but never in front of groups. And though he looked like a hired gun, Sally had come to half jokingly coining him 'a butler'.
Olfaq had been on Mother's inner circle of trusted guard for about a hundred years, and was the leading responsibility for the entertainment in the Boston Halloway Hotel.
Naturally this meant Sally didn't like him.
He stood behind Mother with a smug smile. Sally could feel spirit energy like a heat pouring off of him. Not from him… just all over him. He had been busy.
"Sally," Josh hissed, motioning her over to him.
All eyes were on her. She must have interrupted something. And from the grim expressions on everyone's faces, Sally guessed it was something unpleasant. She shifted her eyes then ghosted across the room so that she stood behind Josh's shoulder. He was pale—she didn't blame him.
"What's going on…?" the ghost whispered. One would have thought that was something quiet, but in a room filled with no sound, and only a few heart beats, the whisper was anything but. So Josh shushed her.
Mother looked to Sally with her long lashed eyes, blinked then set her rigid porcelain chin back to the victim before her. He stood a good inch or so taller than her, but she still looked down at him. A goddess among demons.
Sally noticed blood on the carpet. She was trying to decide whether or not the stain had been there the last time she was in the hotel, or if it was just made. Blood on Mitchell's sleeve implied it was just made.
"I'm tired of this conversation," Mother finally said. Her thin voice cut the air like a knife.
"But George—"
"Snow must like those messengers who are persistent." She snarled, "I already said I was tired of this topic and it would be wise not to bring it up to me again."
Aiden (who had been standing by Mitchell's elbow) took a step forward and rested his hand gently on the guests' shoulder. Mitchell took it as a sign of hostility and nearly bit the vampire's thumb off.
"My lady, if you don't mind. Perhaps it would quell the guest's inquiries if he were to just check the cages so that he may see for himself. If nothing else, then the accusations can be laid to rest and the rest of the rite can be completed without a hostile undertone."
"Do you not wish to know when I feel hostile, Aiden?" Mother hissed.
"It would not be wise to upset your brother Old One on the circle, a mere decade before the passage turns."
The old queen did think about this, then finally let out a cold sigh before waving her hand to the butler. "Olfaq. Once Mr. Mitchell here has accepted the terms and signed his paperwork, you may take him to your entertainment ground. Do what you will with him. Just be sure that his whimpering comes to an end."
This didn't please the old vampire, but still he said: "Yes Ma'am."
The competition came to an end and Mother ascended the staircase in a blink. She glowered down at the gathering below her then calmed her breath. "Little Ghoul," which actually had come to be something of a pet name for Sally. Sally winked out of view for a second before she gathered her wits. "Join me in my office."
"Should have waited till after the meeting," Josh growled under his breath at her.
"How was I to know the meeting was at the front stoop?" Sally asked before she quickly, and obediently, materialized to the top of the step. Mother had already left that place though, so Sally turned and dashed after her as the doors closed.
"Why do my brothers insist on sending me the riffraff?" Mother sighed, putting her bracelet on her office table and wringing her wrist as she fetched a decanter. "I do not appreciate being treated like a thing to be bribed."
"Who is he?" Sally asked, she waited till mother sat before she sat down herself.
"John Mitchell is a neophyte," the old queen started, taking a drawn out sniff of the blood. It couldn't have been more than a few minutes old, as she smelled it the heat from the blood smoked up the glass. She drank it daintily, and it stained the line of her lips a warm glow.
They had a source somewhere, bought hands of rebels or homeless folks willing to trade their lives for the servitude of cattle. Sally couldn't understand how any human could stoop that low. But it kept the old vampires off of the innocent and money in the pockets of starving artists. She quit complaining about it when she learned what was good for her.
"He was a pet project, of an old employee of mine that never took wing. And he is very much a breathing disappointment to a peace treaty," she poured a small cup of red blood for Sally and placed it on the edge of the table.
Sally thanked her and hovered her hands over the little teacup, but she could not drink it… sometimes she wondered if Mother knew that.
"Some of the vampires at the hospital say that Mitchell lives with a werewolf. Is that true?"
"I do not know. What happened to Mitchell in his personal life after he turned isn't of much interest to me. I care only of his reputation in Briton, and I must say I am vastly unimpressed. If you ever begin something, never back down; never let anyone change who you are."
"You think that's what happened to Mitchell, he changed?"
"I think he was never in it for the long run in the first place." She finished her glass. "To become an old one, like us, one must not let empathy follow you. It's not that the sympathy makes you weak, it's the lack of blood kills you. One cannot survive on cold bodies for a hundred years. There are those who have had a change of heart in the past, not uncommon and not completely unrespectable, but deadly to us within decades. Mitchell will die sooner, without a bloodlust he will just cease to exist. A death worse than ash, I suspect. Oblivion… Starvation."
Sally did not bring up the obvious. It was times like these she suspected Mother missed Sarun. That she would pretend a ghost (the ghost roommate of a scorned right hand, no less) was her own daughter was tell enough to the law student.
Sally wanted to hate Mother, and for all rights and purposes, she did. But some human part inside her felt pity for the woman. The woman who, after a few thousand years, could not show any affection to the one being that ever loved her unconditionally.
But this was what Saurn must have known, that despite her mother's painful messages and cold calculating conversations, she was her mother—and protector and queen of a different time. Saurn fought her will upon will to the end, to the moment that wills were not enough, and the stake went through her bursting heart. Saurn knew that she was her mother's daughter, flesh, body… and she would never abandon her.
The moment was over, and mother opened an envelop addressed to someone named 'Great One.' She read it, signed it, then put it back in the envelope then back at the drawer. Sally swore she did so slowly, and deliberately. Before the drawer was closed, Mother said to Sally, "Little Ghoul, there is a ghost pickering around the courtyard. I find her whiny and irksome and suspect she has something to do with that oddity of a vampire that is John Mitchell."
Sally looked out the window and didn't see anything obvious, but it was well after 2 and the quarter moon was washed out by thick rain clouds.
"Do me a favor and tell her to pass on. I do not wish to appear hostile to a child of the dead."
"Right," Sally didn't know how to send off another ghost, just lead some to their doors. And even then, she had very little to do with that. "You take care, Mother."
Any excuse to get out of the office, though. She materialized herself briskly out of the queen's proximity and right to Aiden who was packing a night pack of some sort while John Mitchell was in the foyer with some officials signing away. Judging by the grim and pleasure-less expression on the vampire's face, they were willing away his very head.