Hatcheteer

If you know the Anarch movement, and you know its current difficulties, you should know this about Nines Rodriguez: he is always sort of expecting to die.

If you want to exist near conquerors, an inconvenient voice has two choices. You either

1. Make yourself so small, so similar, that the hawks cannot recognize you, or
2. You get so big the birds won't land for fear of having their feathers ripped out.

Nines Rodriguez has a good head on his shoulders—his forerunners always told him so—but the Brujah have never been real great at being small.

Brujah: This blue hair die-fast sons of anarchy shit is not who they are. At the heart of the Brujah is the real thing, las brujas, the dangerous women. You will find them in all protests, right back to the heretics and the malificum. Pyres in the night, pitchforks in the trees, grilled bones and minor demons. El cadejo, the dark dog. Black magic, baby's blood. Old, old curses, the kind of hate that unbricks castles and unfences fields and cooks constables to feed starved children, because no curse is older than hunger. The language of revolt is not masculine. It's always been mothers and sisters and she-devils—witches—those people who over-and-over the world has done the most wrong.

You find a lot of mouthy kids today want to disown that witch heritage. They say I'm a true Brujah. It's the stupidest horseshit Nines has ever heard. He resents his people in the way contempt for your lessers always comes with control. But despite that, and despite his sad little role here—despite being just whatever they had leftover at the end of a long march—Nines can most of the time still have a little sympathy for them. Not a ton; just enough to tsk, click his tongue on the back of his teeth and say poor thing, what a pity.

You know, some people say Troile gave the "true" Brujah exactly what he deserved.

Baron LA has never demanded anyone call him Baron. He's a Baron nonetheless—something that won't change because Sebastian LaCroix and a council of shriveling Primogen signed on the dotted line. They're beginning to sharpen their pikes behind the boardroom doors. Let 'em has always been Nines's public philosophy on these people, because nobody likes a coward. And anyway, there's no keeping them from it. But until then, he digs in, and he expects the witch-hunt to come.

This time it almost-happened on I-10. There were thunderheads clouding up his rearview, a flatbed full of ammunition behind him. There was a weird stormy smell in the beach air, smogging out a bone-yellow February moon. Even Rodriguez's phone went dead. Downtown pushed along beneath the ongoing blackness where sky met street.

For another fifteen minutes, anyway.

Baron LA had become an aporetic and unpoetic thinker, but when The Angels weren't screaming bloody murder in his ears, which happened most of the time, this city could be all right. Windows rolled halfway, oceanwater wind in your lungs; a man could almost forget the other cities. That's the West, Young Man. It's not built up on swamp or on rock, but on Gold Rush possibility, a kind of sand that doesn't crumble when you stomp real hard. It's all conifers here, honest-to-God Pacific. And when it's late and quiet and just-about warm, you can shelve Chicago, St. Louis, Detroit, Cleveland, Indianapolis, Cincinnati. You can put away the miles you lost to the legionnaires.

These big city dreams don't last. Rodriguez knows that better than most. There is always some bird out there bigger and meaner than you.

Nines glanced for a watch he hadn't worn; flinty moonlight just splintered on a vambrace. It was about eleven. He'd come from a meeting in Hollywood, which went how it always went. Isaac talks big game about preserving the Anarch State; Nines puts on his best snake-eating face and says uh-huh mm-hm but what have you done for us lately?;there is a financial exchange. Movie bucks loaded in a false-name bank account translates to paid-off real estate fees and locked-away places to hide their arsenal. This is the best they will get from the Toreador. Everyone knew Abrams would eventually collapse when the Camarilla hammer really came down.

Rodriguez would've tried for a bigger check, but an accomplice from San Fran had buzzed halfway through tonight's little mano-a-mano; ASAP, the message read; check the cache. He'd been waiting two months now for Kuei-jin intel. Two months of silence was long enough to presume your spy croaked. He had to check it out. In hindsight, would've been smarter to send someone, but Rodriguez didn't trust enough people. One month and some change days since de Luca died, only one Nocturne conference, and no one had shot at him yet.

You want to survive in the snakepit, you can not make the mistake of believing your lie. You are not the biggest king that ever sat upon this hill. He's a witch's son, so he knows there is always some dark machine hulking up, gaining ground, readying the siege, closing the distance. One day, that far-off machinery is going to bulldoze you and your hill.

But sometimes Nines Rodriguez forgets, for a second, to expect that any old minute is maybe the minute he gets fried.

It should've been stillwater tonight. This drop point had always been a deadzone. Unused apartment box wedged in a nasty neighborhood, Sunnyside Condos. Unfunny joke. One day the Ventrue would figure out that high-security deliveries draw moths to flame—and on that day, he'd worry—but for now, unlocked boxes are the best way to hide from black ties.

Hell, the exit was barely sixty seconds away.

So no. On that night, at that moment, on that road, what-ifing and philosophizing, Nines was not at all expecting to die.

Imagine his mood, then: when a dreary gray car hopped the next lane and exploded into the door.

"SHHH—" was about all the Brujah got out before his front tire connected with median, and everything took a mad lurch sideaways.

Ms. Woeburne did, too.

Lurch, that is, when the right side of her ugly rental gave a predictable and distinctive bang.

Because that's exactly what it sounded like. Not flashy. Maybe even understated: bang.

The truck went reeling.

You might be interested in hearing the full story.

I mean, you'd be at pretty serious disadvantage, wouldn't you, if you stopped right here. Two conflicting stories are better than an incomplete one, but the resultant confabulation is not exactly kosher. It's confusing to shift gears mid-story, granted. Not what you'd call good reporting. But sometimes you'll just need to break form and do it.

And keep in mind, as you do, that it is significantly more difficult following the opening speaker in a debate than opening it yourself—because the formerly objective audience now has their head full of spiel they'll need to unlearn. It's not your fault, strictly speaking. Anyone would be misled if they spent too much time letting the underdog dramatize at them. But it would be irresponsible not extrapolate from a different angle, because the difficult thing about truth is that even when someone thinks they're telling it, they can't give it to you in full.

Ms. Woeburne, likewise, can't three-hundred-and-sixty-degree—but nevertheless, someone trying to make a politicized decision should probably hear from the other side.

Well, here is where she's at.

Like it or not, as a matter-of-fact: her two hands strangling the steering wheel, her shoulders deep into the polyester, her eyelids peeled. Two wheels, too, squealing wildly on the front axle of her car. The impact and the ricochet tossed her fender away. Her car slammed off the enemy truck, which had slammed over the lane divider, leaving Ms. Woeburne bouncing scot-free like the luckier end of a Newton's cradle, parts howling precariously down this stretch of unlucky street.

She did not scream. Nope. Not even a little one.

S.W. actually shut her eyes when the pickup bounced, spun into another lane (where it was hit by two more cars), then flipped underside-up to disappear over the median, showering sparks and screeching the awful screech of ruined metal.

Doubt her side of this all you want; that's your prerogative; she can't keep you from it. But, just in case, and for your consideration: one tire came about twelve inches from bursting glass out of her passenger window.

To remind you: she is not secret police.

She is not a card-carrying member of the Scourge. She is a clerk who sits heels-touching in a Tower office or cross-legged on her suite's uncomfortable leather couch and reads transcripts. She hellos prickly hellos at Joelle and lifts up her eyebrows at impertinent remarks. She signs things, shakes hands, oversees the mooks in Sebastian's censorship department. She never met the Primogen. She is a loyalist who just spent twenty measly, dreary, foggy nights shut alone inside a cubicle, where she was not visible. S. M. Woeburne is a Caligula houseplant. She is watching eyes, canned vote, waiting pen.

She wasn't expecting it, either. At least, the "it" she was expecting did not include running headlong into interference at a six-point intersection midway through what we'll call a light errand. A small pick-up task on her way to the office tonight. Largely unimportant, you might assume, because it was S.W. doing the footwork—steadfast S.W., who was not especially handy in a fight—Foreman S.W., whose reaction-chain was to startle first, shoot second, ask later. There was no subscript to this order. She needed only be sure to get it done within the next forty-five minutes. There had not even been a meeting about it. Someone placed the memo on her small public desk, right in plain view, atop the neat box labeled INCOMING.

For S.W.: fetch this, please, would you; be subtle; much thanks, kind regards.

Unorthodox, sure. But a touch of unorthodoxy isn't terribly unusual when you work for a blood-drinking eldritch horror. Once Sebastian had even asked her to pickpocket someone else's weekly dues from a Harpy's book-keeper. She said yes-sir then, too. Of course she was going to say it now.

These are the sorts of sticky, sock-feet tasks a corporal expects. But she was not about to play hot-potato with enemy correspondence. Our soldier had started tonight like every other: she tucked her keys next to her pistol, loaded and locked; she closed the highest button on her jacket; she combed straight her short, dark hair.

So please understand that if had there been any palatable way to convince herself the vehicle that just switched its blinkers left-turn did not belong on the page THREAT LEVEL - RED, then Ms. Woeburne would have nabbed it. You may not know her. But you must know that.

They clearly must've found out somehow. They must have known. This was exactly what happened to Victor de Luca: torched into an oily crisp. She was not about to stop this car, step out, and stomp straight into a casualty list. She'd clenched ten fingers around the wheel. She'd thought about it.

Ms. Woeburne was not like Victor de Luca. Ms. Woeburne had a career in front of her.

She proofed and processed. She navigated two lanes. She checked her seatbelt. She flicked away a grim piece of hair and stonily committed to what was – until that point, anyway – probably the most executive thing she could've done.

She smashed her toe into the gas pedal and banked hard right.

It sounded like an explosion, anyway.

Wreckage: at her, then behind her, like whoosh! Once she was far enough from the point of impact, the Ventrue craned to assess, standing on the mud carpet, shock stonewalling anything else. She could not see the driver. Two nearby vehicles had failed to flag and crashed nose-first into one another, spilling alloys and plastics over the interstate. One motorcycle had been totaled by a snapped door. Wheels were jutting skywards in awkward, gory angles. Ammunition broke out of the truckbed and went flying everywhere.

'Killed,' Ms. Woeburne decided, cotton-mouthed, smacking her lips. Her fingers were paralyzed; she could not have pried them free if she tried. 'Neutralized,' a voice suggested—a better, less visceral word.

There was a fierce, fender-sized dent slammed one foot into her bleak car.

The Foreman squeaked just short of sandwiching a family SUV. Her fists white-knuckled the steering wheel.

A crowd was growing. S.W., absorbing the fallback, slowed down to fumble, to remember her parts. She had a cellphone in here somewhere. Was her nose bleeding? There were these little rusty blotches on her blouse, her thumbs, her khaki pants. She must have bashed it on something. Funny; she couldn't remember doing that. It must've hurt. You'd think bonking your face into a steering wheel would be memorable. Whiplash? There was a distinct static swirl through the nerves at the base of her skull. There was also a large wobble where one of her tires ruptured. It made the Volvo hop like a sad Igor; it clacked the teeth inside Ms. Woeburne's head.

"Damn it," she said, and then, because there was nobody else to interrupt her, she said it again. "Damn it. Please. Where did it go."

The tightness of her hands made it difficult, once she'd found her phone, to tap the right numbers. Or maybe it was the way her wrists were shaking. The stereo kept on with evening news, and the Foreman's watch kept clacking over the bone. Easily a couple blocks ahead of the collision now and nothing seemed to be moving anymore. Why did they make these buttons so small? The Ventrue was only dimly aware of who she ought to be calling, but had a stronger sense, always, of who she was supposed to be.

"You are being hysterical," Mr. LaCroix would've observed—and then she saw a version of herself sitting beside her, a little more hardhearted, a little grayer, in the passenger's seat. The harder Ms. Woeburne frowned and with her Sire's voice said: "What do you want me to tell you? Natural selection?"

S.W. seriously considered bailing out of the disaster and dashing up this freeway on foot. She couldn't sit here; she had to do something. No Ventrue compromises her organization by being convicted for a hit-and-run.

The other version of herself—before it vanished—blinked twice and said understand where you are.

Ms. Woeburne stopped, sobered, sniffed, stuffed a nostril with a dashboard tissue, recollected herself, and smoothed her hackles into something resembling sanity. It was with shark eyes that she took all of this apart.

The temperature was ten degrees from chilly. Slight, invariable breeze. Three squad cars led an ambulance towards the crash-site some distance behind her; a man was carrying armfuls of towels; one striped semi came rumbling in, decelerating slowly, from the opposite direction.

"Well," she said, wobbly, and breathed out.

Without criticizing what her body was doing, Ms. Woeburne stood through the moon-roof with pistol-in-hand.

There. Now that you are caught up and come round to where you started: Step back to where Nines was telling you about somebody's top-down logic trying to break witches apart.

He fell palms-and-knees out of the open wound that used to be a passenger door.

The Baron was blinking dully. The blacktop was torched. It burned him, but who cares; everything felt like a stick fire in a stone oven. Cement pebbles and bits of scrap scattered the roadside. Yellow tracks right up in his face.

He looked right. He looked left.

Rodriguez's left sleeve was fierce, unsanitary crimson. Color like thick wet paint. Shattered glass wrote weird, furious shapes into one of his forearms; char marks and blood blossoms. He could smell the singe of clothing. Gasoline scorched were it got in through the pores of his skin. People hollering, weakly, then loudly, from somewhere way out east, where he couldn't see so good right now. A significant piece of truck was laying yards away from its chassis, thrown across the highway. Red dripped into the space where both his hands pressed the tarmac. Nose? Mouth? Scalp? What? He couldn't tell because his fingers were dead. Whatever it was stung. The windshield went through him, all he fucking knew, and Nines didn't check only because his limbs were throbbing just about as badly.

The Anarch pawed at his throat, at his breastbone, expecting Swiss cheese, feeling nothing. One hand popped his dislocated jaw back into place without even thinking about it.

Having figured out he wasn't immediately about to die, wondering if it was safe to stand up, Baron LA now fixed upon two important questions: 1. What the fuck just happened? and 2. What the fuck was that?

Politics aside—ten years later or maybe two—wherever it started and whoever'd finish it—you can get them to agree on one thing: It's a stupid-ass vampire who thinks things just happen, boom, no reason at all.

Shock turned up fast. It muted the couple dozen kine buzzarding around, ignored the Good Samaritan construction worker who'd leapt that smashed up median to drag away survivors. Benevolent idiot flipped over three parched carcasses before finding Nines. Two big gloved fists had him by the shirt without a word. Man pulled him up by the scruff—maybe not the smartest move—but Rodriguez's guts stayed in place and his ears were ringing too loudly to say no. He couldn't really react when the guy jammed one shoulder beneath his blood-soaked arm, either, and put the hundred-year-old Brujah up right.

He managed to stand on his own with a little push. The sudden crispness of breeze was surprising up here. Palm trees—over all this mess, it still smelled like boomtown California—and it would've been funny, except for the underdraft of roasted meat. One foot under the other. He staggered, was steadied, and it was only when nobody held him up anymore that the Baron realized he had been leaning on the guy. His right knee wouldn't lock like it should. Wasn't there a wallet in that pocket? Hadn't there just been something to do?

Had this leatherworks taste in his mouth. Rodriguez stayed up; then it was someone else's thumb pointing him towards the curb, where a company van sat, open and waiting for triage. Giant orange debris-crusher. There was a smear of cyclist lying somewhere back there. Nines fumbled dumbly for his handguns and located all three, not that either hand knew what to do right now. No one fired off any shots.

The human was talking at him. Looked kind of like this hatchetman him and Chester used to run through Springfield with. He had only distant awareness of what was being said. "You're alright, man. – Snapped it, that's all. Going to be fine. – You'll be O.K," the construction guy kept repeating. He couldn't answer. Then words themselves went weird—turned into something that man couldn't have been saying, but that the Brujah heard, clear as the real time he heard it. Hey, buddy-boy, I'm talking to you. What's your name, sugar? Speakuh the English? You got a tongue in your mouth? Nines said I can't hear anything and didn't hear himself say it, either. Then he was redirected, turned around and pointed at the letters on that van: Somebody AND SONS.

He looked down and walked. His arm was bent in a way it should not have been able to. But he had to keep moving; had to figure out what happened; had to get off the street, at least, limping for AND SONS. Headlights flashed everywhere around him and everyone else. His mind was spinning in circles. Baron LA—who was no more Baron LA than the next guy right at this second—dazedly reached the shoulder, trying not to attract attention, good arm tucked protectively around his middle. The right one was busted, he knew, alongside what felt like an ankle and a side. It was all a general, hazy hurt.

He sat heavily on the bumper of the empty van and tried to make his mind tick straight again.

It wouldn't work just because Nines asked it to. He had to come back to himself—but he felt something coming up, too—and, thinking he was about to puke, the Baron leant to the side and turned his head away.

At the end of the wreck: a little gray car.

And, if his brain wasn't playing tricks on him: a little series of gunshots. Pop-pop, one-two.

A series of events:

The truck driver's forehead thunked down on the wheel. A lifeless hand spilled coffee from its holder. The oncoming eighteen-wheeler stuttered a handful of yards, tentative in its newfound freedom; the speed built gradually; then, quite without warning, the front axle foundered, and the oblong abdomen swung around to careen lamely down the highway.

All of five minutes. Maybe seven, if you counted the collision itself.

And there was Nines Rodriguez bowing with his hands on his knees against the side of an AND SONS van, dumping someone's water bottle over his stinging neck, trying to wake himself up.

He looked up through the dripping of his hair and maybe—if he'd had his wits about him, and if it hadn't been for the overloaded truck shaving the street—he'd have noticed there was somebody inside that little gray car.

This is not my day, Nines thought. Then he fell, leaving the rest of them, on his side, under the van, and through that closing gap of floorboard and sky.

By the time the truck had settled down the razed stretch of a road, the hatchet and her nosebleed were a mile away.