The more Lloyd thought about it the better it became. So here it was, as he sat in the sitting room mid morning, perusing the small handwritten list. Firstly there was Cole, he had already given details of his own foes, the ones who sought to end him or destroy his precious picture, same with Zane, himself and Jay, all written down and accounted for.
His fingers moving down the list. Then there was Kai and Nya, their foe was one and the same, Van Helsing. Both siblings had an insatiable desire for the taste of human blood, the only drawback, whilst in Vampire aspect, neither entertained the thought of consuming something else, lest it be a bottle of recently donated blood.
Lloyd, whilst in his Jekyll persona, had questioned himself on what it actually was, thinking perhaps the blood lust was a source of nourishment required for homeostasis and quite literal survival or perhaps it was an addiction? Technically to become a vampire indicated death must have occurred in order for vampirism to have taken affect. Rather a werewolf transformation just enhances the bodies natural ability to heal, to be faster and to travel great distances without breaking a sweat, amongst many other things.
Though, the vision of both of them devouring their own brother was something he would never forget regardless if they couldn't get out of this god forsaken hellhole. He doubted he would ever get that bizarre image from his mind, it was haunting yet macabre. Both Kai and Nya were drinking him dry as Jay had been sleeping. The look of fear and sheer terror on Jay's face was a look he would never forget.
The blood…..was everywhere, like a cut throat shave gone horribly wrong.
Obviously they had been careful in selecting the right area to bite down on. Because as soon as Cole had hit them over the heads with a well placed cudgel, the blood continued to gush. It wasn't squirting with an arterial pressure behind it, but it was quickly pooling.
And Jay, poor Jay ended up looking like he was the victim of Jack the Ripper.
Oh if only they knew Mr Hyde as well as I.
Here he was, living with Cole or Dorian Gray, the enigmatic young man who never aged and never bore disease. He watched as the black haired man went about his daily primping routines in front of the grand mirror in the hallway. Concerned for him and his entire team, not once had Cole shown any remorse nor sorrow for Sybil.
Then there was Jay, that masterfully evil mind at play which was the persona that was Victor Frankenstein. A mentally unstable inventor, who took too much laudanum to keep up a regular and understandable conversation with even the most intelligent London aristocrats.
Indeed, it was an an auspicious arrangement at best. One thought out with the best interests of Jay being at hand. The arrangement being; that when Lloyd stayed here, Zane would usually remain at Jay's side. That whole living arrangement had changed in the blink of an eye when last night, for reasons unknown to Cole and Kai, something drastic happened to Lloyd.
Regardless of his nightly activities, being caught or not, there was still exasperation on Lloyd's mind. Not helped by the fact that he himself had arranged the trip and was holding the bulky parchment tickets for their upcoming departure. Six tickets for first class, no steerage, Dorian would never be seen in steerage anymore. Not since Harry had intervened with the whole grand design of changing him into a creature of sin and filth.
"Cole? Dorian?" He corrected, calling the latter name, louder. He placed the tickets down on the dresser, amidst the inkwells and wax sealing paraphernalia, including Dorian's signet ring with his own sealing emblem.
Cole had wandered into the sitting room, his cases were packed and readily waiting by the lobby door to be bundled onto the carriage for delivery to the port tomorrow. He wasn't answering to his name being uttered, but rather looking down at the travel documents with unease. "We are still going to see Jay tonight, right?"
"Yeah, of course." Came the faster than usual response, Lloyd placed his drink down nervously. "Tonight, as arranged."
"Erm Cole, can I talk to you?" He shifted on the velveteen chaise. For some reason it felt like it was covered in spikes, he felt sore all over, still none the wiser about what had transpired the night passed.
"Sure, fire away."
"There's another reason I needed you and Kai to come with me to America. Something not necessarily related to what we might find over there. Something deeper, relating to me."
"Hmm," Cole didn't verbalise. He waited patiently for Lloyd to spill the beans, well the parts he may have remembered. Cole already knew what occurred last night, he was certainly privy to it. Having witnessed the remnants of the evening fall into a level of disrepute he didn't think Lloyd capable of. It was similar to being hungover with no reasonable recollection of just how drunk you'd been.
Cole noticed that Lloyd look humiliated in some ways, in a world of torment, not pain per se, torment and confusion. "Ya know last night, I, well something happened to me."
"Yeah, you let the other part of you take over."
Lloyd picked up on Cole's unimpressed tone. The embarrassment increasing a hundredfold. "So, did I flip out here or elsewhere?" He was sure he didn't want to know the full details, some recollection would be nice though.
"Like it really matters to you, you were in a foul mood." Cole shrugged, grabbing the newspaper and turning to the page in question.
"Come on, don't be like that. You know Hyde almost as much as I do and you know he's prone to flipping out at a moments' notice, bit like my Dad was before the Overlord got inside him."
"Wow, now that's a picture I don't want in my head."
"Look Cole, I'm sorry for what happened last night. Does that make it any better?"
"A little. Still doesn't let you off the hook though. Being as you're supposed to be the one with your head screwed on, the leader and all important green ninja, ya know?"
"I know, and like I said, I'm sorry for flipping out. Could you enlighten me though?"
"Well, let's put it this way, if you were here, this place would look like a shit hole." He hid his impromptu smirk. This place was so ostentatious he couldn't help but feel admiration for Dorian Gray and his lavish lifestyle choices. Just another piece of Cole being chipped away by the ever young and charming playboy, now worries save for his portrait.
"You weren't here when it happened you stormed off when we had an argument about Jay. You started some mad brawl in London, killed and maimed a few people, typical Hyde sort of stuff, hid the bodies at a guess, in Victor's cold storage."
"Phew, got off lucky then?"
Cole nodded, head cocking to the side. "You were lucky you weren't killed." He said, thrusting a copy of a London broadsheet newspaper into his brother's hands. "Lloyd, ya know, you're aren't bullet proof, nor knife proof. You gotta keep us in the loop a bit more, trust us, we're your brothers."
Lloyd cringed when he saw the headlines depicting some crazed killed roaming the London streets. He nodded, hushing his voice as the housekeepers walked past, continuing with the daily chores of sweeping, polishing and beating rugs. "My potion, the one that stops the transformations…"
Cole closed the doors to the black clad sitting room. "What about it?"
He sat down waiting for Lloyd to speak when the truth hit him between the eyes like an ice pick. The story of Jekyll and Hyde and the difficulty of keeping Mr Hyde restrained. The destructive force that was and that will be. In place of the calm and collected Dr Jekyll, the one who could be reasoned with, without dire consequence. Cole bunched his eyebrows together. "Oh god, don't tell me, you're running out aren't you?"
"I am." Lloyd nodded but to relieve the increasing tension he retrieved a sheet of paper that had the number of remaining potions scrawled on. "I have enough phials to last the journey and maybe some for the return. I had thought about weaning the amount down to see if I can prolong them further. So they'll last longer, giving us more time."
Bad idea, unless you can measure the amount you'll be weaning off of. Like a teaspoon less?"
"Yeah, I can do that. I tried to replicate it too, with Zane's help but no matter what I try, the mixture doesn't bind like the original did." Lloyd threw himself back in the chair, grateful that Cole's housekeepers hadn't lit the fire this warm spring morning. "We figured it to be a faulty batch to begin with, well, Zane did. Nothing works, which means that's all the potions I've got"
"Okay, I get it, time sensitive. Which means, you're either gonna need to stay with me or Zane, I don't rate your chances with Kai, you both have addictive personalities."
"Pot kettle black, Cole."
"Fair point." He shrugged, holding his cup of morning tea. "But, unlike you, I don't flip from sane to insane at the drop of a hat. Or Kai, from normal moody night walker to ravenous werewolf who tears the clothes off of all his conquests. No, in relation to you guys, I'm actually the one who's relatively normal."
A scathing masculine voice permeated the room, making both pale faced individuals turn to the newest source of disturbance.
"Normal in that you'll never age?" Kai had walked in, hearing his name called had already placed him in a bad mood.
"Speak of the devil. Morning Kai, Nya up yet?"
"Cole, you know she doesn't rise until sunset."
"Why are you up so early then?"
"Best of both worlds, I can get up early, because I'm an animal and in relation to your unfounded accusation, I can control it now, my girlfriends leave with their clothes intact."
Cole's eyebrow rose. "Maybe you need some pointers from yours truly."
"I don't need any pointers from you. Ya know, if you were a normal guy and not my brother I'd wipe that smug grin off your face and smear it all over the floor."
"Hey, it wasn't my doing, you can blame Harry for that and the rest of it too."
"I bet if it wasn't for the dude that painted that hideous picture, you'd be riddled with a shit load of STD's too, courtesy of Sir Henry?"
"It wasn't always a hideous picture and, the dude has a name, Kai." Cole tilted his head in annoyance. "But yeah, of course, why do ya think my picture is so damned creepy? It takes all the weakness, injury, disease and stuff that this body has endured and it's all manifested into that one portrait."
"No wonder it's creepy, you shown Jay yet?"
"No, Kai. I'm not sure how he'd react."
"Well, I knew how I felt…" Lloyd interjected a grim look on his face.
"That was how I felt too, Lloyd. Shit, that picture makes me look like a fricking zombie because of everything that Dorian has done to himself..." He paused deep in thought. Thinking back to the original philosophical novel, it was once such a beautiful portrait that it was hung, pride of place, above the mantel place in the sitting room. The very place that now bore a large picture of a deserted dining table overlaid with a sumptuous banquet, the banquet that would never be eaten.
On the night Cole had woken as Dorian Gray, the first thing he did was write some mad ramblings including but not limited to each character, their immediate enemies and places where they could be found. Fearing that if he didn't write them down, he'd forget.
Cole, disheartened, had only found the two, Zane and Jay, like old times. Once he knew they were safe and otherwise accounted for, he'd taken that very cautious next step. Unlocking his attic, climbing the rickety stairs into the eaves, Cole had reluctantly pulled back the velvet coffin lined fabric that he knew to be covering the rumoured portrait. And when he did, he was stunned beyond words. It was his chance to reacquaint himself, but when he looked upon it, what he saw was terrifying. It was even worse in real life, or, specifically, the life he was being made to live.
The picture of an old man would have been preferable to what stood before him. This was of a half decayed man. It was of a ghoulish creature, the barest humanoid features possible that hardly differentiated him from the dead and buried. The rest of the shadow of a man looked like he should have been interred long ago.
There was very little human aspect left now, the worst part of the picture now bore mould and fungus, eating the picture away each fibre at a time as the canvas slowly bore the brunt of the damp environs it was constantly kept in.
"It also reflects bad choices, like what happened before Sybil died or when Basil Hallward was uhm, killed."
"And those words spoken in haste?" Kai surmised.
Cole nodded. "Yeah, no matter what I do now there's no going back with my picture…"
"But it's not your picture Cole, it's Dorian's. You, you're getting too engaged and involved with him."
"Thanks Kai, I know, and it's hard not to become too engrossed though when you consider I live here and I can hear it every night."
"Hear what?" Lloyd said.
"The picture, dude, seriously come on, I can't be the only other one that hears it?"
"It's just you and me Kai. Lloyd, the picture in the loft groans on occasion. You might think it's creaking floorboards but it's not."
"Great, haunted picture, werewolf, two maniacs, vampire, me and narcissus over there. We're so fricking hooped." He groaned, head in hands. "If we don't get to America we're gonna be stuck like this forever."
"Wow, way to improve the shitty mood, Lloyd."
"Sorry Kai."
"And I'm sorry too guys, specifically sorry to burst your bubble Lloyd, but you won't, you're physically older than all of us. Then there's Zane, Jay." he muttered sorrowfully.
"Hey, Cole you can't think like that bro. We'll sort this out, get back home before any of us takes the great dirt nap." His firm, overly hairy hand settled upon Cole's slender framed shoulder. "Anyway, other than Lloyd doing a midnight flit last night, which I should say; awesome job of keeping in the shadows and laying low, ya know, what we all agreed to?" Spiky and extremely unruly hair pointing at Lloyd, followed by some annoyed red eyes.
"I'm sorry okay, how many times do you want me to apologise for that?"
"How much time we got before tonight, Cole?"
"A few hours, still lunchtime, party won't start until sunset." Cole replied.
"A few hours of grovelling should do it, considering it was me that had to drag your filthy ass back here in the dead of the night with blood and god knows what else stuck to you. Haa, actually I had a lot of fun hosing you down."
Not even attempting to supress a smirk at the most recent memory of seeing a bedraggled Lloyd climbing out of a cold water bath. "You didn't hose him down Kai, you chucked him in the horses water trough."
Lloyd's face screwed up tight, displaying his disgust at the thought of having his face licked. "Eww gross. So that's why I smelled like damp dog this morning?"
Unabashed, without a care in the world, Kai shrugged his shoulders. "Yep, needs must. I could've just licked you down though. All that blood was just asking to be licked off."
Lloyd shuddered. "You didn't did you?"
Kai grinned, luckily his werewolf aspect was subdued from the secret pampering session afforded to Lloyd, late last night. "I might've licked your face. I mean, you can't blame me, you looked half dead, so I had to make you look presentable."
"You just had to! Eugh why?" He took a discrete sniff of his exposed skin. His hands, being all that was accessible, now mildly surprised that his hands bore the faintest scent of a soap substitute.
"Because I wasn't gonna haul your ass back here in the still of night with people looking at the both of us. You were covered in blood, like literally drenched in it. I found you in a slaughterhouse Bro, quite impressive really. Even I had a feast, whilst you were out cold."
"What knocked me out?"
"Beats me," he shrugged. "Like I said you were lucky the police didn't catch you, you'd have been hauled in for questioning if they'd seen you in the state I found you in."
"Where's Zane?" Lloyd asked. "Thought he'd be joining us for breakfast?"
"He's with, well, he has female company again." Cole laughed softly. "Cut him some slack though, this whole human body thing is taking some getting used to. He's probably enjoying it far more than is healthy too."
"So that's who I could hear all of this early morning, no wonder he's sleeping so much."
Both Kai and Cole nodded uncomfortably.
Cole took his place in a black leather armchair, papers firmly in hand. "Like I said, he's still getting used to it."
"So," Kai turned to Lloyd, being that Cole was nose deep in paperwork. "What are the final plans for tonight then, being as you two have already been discussing it?"
"I wouldn't say we were discussing it in any depth. Just that we're going to see Jay tonight and it'll be the last time we see him for a good few weeks. Igor will be staying with him and accompanying him. He said he'll keep in contact with us when we get to the other side."
"So, are we supposed to be bringing anything with us? Like a 'see you soon card' or a bottle of finest Scotch whisky to say 'sorry Bro, you can't come because you're insane?' Though, I'm kinda thinking we can spread that out to you too"
"Thanks for the recognition," Lloyd shook his head, mortification rising once more. "As normal as possible, relaxed and calm. We don't want him to become any more anxious than he already is." Casting a disapproving glance back at Cole. The sole instigator who had caused some of these anxieties to surface being that Cole had been the one to kindle the first showings of romance between himself and Jay.
Jay's newfound anxieties could only be attributed to Cole's shows of affection both in the bedroom and when liaising in social gatherings. He created such a whirlwind of emotions to surface that Jay or Victor was questioning his own twisted sanity. He pushed his own feelings of love to the back of his mind in place of his precious creations.
"Transport to get there later?" Kai asked. Staring wistfully at the empty hearth, wishing to see the warmth of his element once more.
"Me and Lloyd are travelling there together." Cole replied, not looking up from the small pile of paperwork in his lap. "Zane's getting there first, then I've arranged a further carriage for you and Nya, at sundown."
"And before you ask, We sail tomorrow, lunchtime. Which reminds me," Cole finally looked up, "I need your luggage too Lloyd. I reckon you've got a few hours to pack before we're due to leave. You don't need help do ya?"
"No, I'm fairly sure I can pack my own stuff."
"Fine, you can pack your own cases, you're gonna need more than one. And, just so you guys know, Jay's planning on surprising us tonight. Be prepared for something horrific."
Lloyd smirked, "And unnaturally masterfully insane."
Kai and Cole grimaced at the thought. It was only Lloyd that knew of Victor's creation, after all, he was the one supplying the majority of components required for reanimation.
"You're gonna love it."