Chapter 60 – Fate Of The Sabbat

October 9, 2004 = Saturday

~Eliza Flores~

With a large enough that even firefighters couldn't put it out without specialized equipment, Sammie led the way down the stairs to Andrei's lair. We had set up our plan which would end with Andrei staked so Sammie could take his blood without giving him a chance to possess her or fight back.

A glance around the lowest floor of the hotel showed me how well the Sabbat had prepared for the Camarilla's assault. Old cars had been rolled onto their sides to make barricades of steel all along the wall. More cars had been wedged in behind them at the entrance and exits, purportedly to keep the deputies from ramming their way in to the hotel.

I had to say they were well prepared, but Sammie's betraying them had allowed the wolf directly behind their defenses and now their destruction was assured. All that was left of the heavy hitters was Andrei, and as Sammie paused in front of the door to allow me to get into position beside her, meant he was as good as dead.

He just didn't know it yet.

"Sire," Sammie said as she opened the door to his private area. "A guest to see you."

"Da, copilul meu," he said in a crooning voice. "Send them in."

"Come," Sammie said as she stepped to the side to allow me entrance. "Archbishop Andrei Lupei will see you now."

I took that as my cue to step into view and Andrei's face went from blank to pure hatred as he snarled, "Puppet!"

I also got my first idea of how truly alien Andrei's private area was and why Sammie hadn't been able to describe it. The best way I could was that Andrei had made a large pool of organs and other body parts between the door and where he now stood. Various bodies with their innards removed and large sections of skin tacked to the dirt itself like some grotesque science display adorned the walls at regular intervals.

It was truly horrific.

"Submit now or face execution," I told him, my own voice shaking a bit at the horrific display but holding a lot of confidence as he had little to attack me with. Sammie had said they hadn't been able to leave to reap victims to make more szlachta, and the last few they had made had already been destroyed in raids.

"Miserable ignorant gutterspawn!" he roared at me. "You are blind! The sarcophagus must be destroyed!"

"Destroyed is what you're about to be," I told him. His eyes went to Sammie, but Sammie looked excited.

"Childe?" he asked her and she smiled.

"I told you I could bring her to me," she said with a smile. "As you can see, I carried through on my promise. If you Sabbat hadn't been so keen to torture me, I might begged her to take me out of here. Instead, I begged her to free me, which she has. Your Baali bitch, Celeste, is dead for good this time, and now, she's going to stake you and then I'm going to diablerize you."

Andrei's face snarled in rage as he realized his jig was up, then purple enveloped him. Sammie's face went a bit slack at the display of power, but I just pulled a blade from the shadows and readied myself. Like a horror movie, Andrei shifted his form to one that was decidedly more armored than his normal one with spikes over his back and long claws on his hands.

Once he was shifted, he jumped into the pool to disappear in grotesque display, but Sammie seemed scared over something.

"I didn't know he could do that," she said in a high voice. "I didn't think he could do that to his own body!"

"Can he leave?" I asked her, but she shook her head.

"I think he's swimming through it," she told me, then I had to duck as Andrei leaped up to attack me. He soared harmlessly over me to grab onto the wall behind me, giving me a hard kick into the muck.

Expecting it to be soft, I didn't let my body relax to roll through it so it came as a shock to me when I hit the muck and felt the shock of hitting a hard surface. I did manage to roll free of Andrei as he dove for me, but instead of hitting the muck like a solid surface, he dove through it like Scrooge diving into his money bin.

"How's he doing that?" I asked Sammie as I regained my feet.

"No idea," she said, worrying me more. "Looks like..."

Sammies words were cut off as Andrei again jumped from the muck, so close I didn't even have time to defend myself as he slashed at my leather bolero style jacket. Thankfully, the heavy leather and studs protected me from the worst of his enormous claws. I grabbed him by the arm after the first slash, preventing him from disappearing and tried to slash at him but the thickness of his skin and hardened shell-like armor made my blades useless.

We continued to roll and tussle, and I found myself trapped in an endless cycle of back and forth with the elder kindred. He was strong enough to hold off my potence, and I knew if I let go of his arms, he would shred me with his claws.

It was when he sprouted a second set of arms I felt my options disappear. At first normal, a purple haze coated them and began to change them to be like the ones I was currently fending off. Knowing my time was short, and my options limited in the fast paced tussle, I did the first thing that popped in my head.

Extending my fangs, I bit Andrei on the neck and began to feed. The exquisite feelings he was having slackened his ability to fight as I held the deadly kindred close. I didn't even think about what I was doing as I drained him of blood, my own brain lost in euphoria as I fed of what tasted like true power on my tongue.

It was only when there was nothing left to feed from that I became aware of the world around me and the ash I was now sprawled over. I slowly got to my feet, dusting the ash off my leather outfit as I took in Sammie's shocked face not a few steps away made me realize what I had done, and how screwed I might be.

"You..." Sammie said, putting her hand on my shoulder.

"We'll cross that bridge when we get to it," I said quickly. A look upwards showed smoke starting to leak through the ceiling, and I could only imagine what was going on up there. "Want to watch the fun?"

"Sure," Sammie said. Taking my friend in my arms, I pushed mys sight to the shadows near where Jean had been standing to find the hotel in full blaze. Bodies already littered the street outside so I moved to a shadow on top of the building opposite and stepped us there. Sammie looked shocked at the trip, but smiled at seeing the hotel in flames.

"And here we were thinking we couldn't be routed."

"Oh, I'd say any place could be breached if you hit hard enough," a voice with a very British accent said from behind us.

I spun to find two kindred standing on the roof with us, a guy and a woman. The guy was a peroxide blond, his hair done up in gel and looking like white-hot flames, and was dressed in a black duster over a T-shirt and leather pants. The woman had long, straight dark brown hair and was full on heroin chic with hard jaw lines and an almost anemic look that was accentuated with her Victorian retro-style look and black beaded choker.

Apart, the guy was clearly the scrapper of the pair and looked the part, and with her touchy-feely way of pouring herself on her friends shoulder, had me thinking she was Toreador. The guy? With no clear sense of refinement, and tough guy attitude, had me thinking he was Brujah.

"So, did my childe get out?" he asked me and I gave him a shrug.

"Which was your childe?"

"Oh, about your height, dark hair, went by the name Celeste Evans," he said as he laid it out for me. A cold chill went down my spine as I realized there were only two ways this man could be Celeste's sire. He was Tremere, which meant he could see the streak of black marking my recent diablerie of Andrei, or he was Baali and I had a whole new can of worms to eat.

"I killed her," I said, then formed a shadow-blade, hiding it by running the blade up my back. "Long standing feud."

"Aww," the woman cooed in a high voice, her accent also very British, then ran a hand up her companions abs as she gave me a very toothy smile. "Poor baby didn't get the chance to release her magic. Well, we're going to destroy the world. Want to come?"

"Pass," I said, getting a smirk from the guy. "I assume you two are Baali."

"Am now," he said, his smirk widening. "Was Toreador. Dru here was Malkavian, though I don't think the madness ever left her."

"You should hear the stars sing, sometime," she said, and I briefly wondered what it would be like to fight the pair.

"Let her hear the stars sing later, luv," the guy said as he kept his eyes on me. "Right now, she's about two seconds from trying to gut me."

"This one has power," Dru said, somehow keeping herself draped over her friend as she changed sides. "I can feel it from the outside."

"Yeah?" he said, finally taking his eyes off me. I moved as fast as I could, pushing my undead muscles with all the celerity I could muster as I charged the blonde man as he looked at his friend.

What happened next happened so fast I wasn't sure what he did. As fast as an eye blink, I went from looking at his ear to looking at the stars, a sharp pain in my chest telling me where my shadow-blade ended up as I was now laying flat on my back on the roof.

"Pity," he said, moving to stand over me and block my view of the stars.

"Poor baby reminds me of daddy," Dru said as the man knelt beside me. "All stretched out and dead."

The guy hung his head at that, but he was smirking when he raised his head. "Pity Angel's all dead. Damn that blond pet of his. If you ever get old enough to have pets, don't ever get one that's a hunter."

"Why?" I asked him, wondering if there was something I should know about Yukie.

"They're hunters," he said, scoffing that he had to explain it. "They never stop hunting. They wait, they watch, then they strike you like a sword to the heart. Pity Angel's wasn't proverbial. Hunter dusted him in his own haven, then walked out. I'd hunt her down and kill her if I thought I could find her."

"Can a hunter be made into a ghoul?" I asked and his smirk deepened into a smile, but the evilness in it wasn't comforting.

"Could, if you're brave enough to keep one close. But that's like taming a tiger, luv. They only have to maul you once."

"The stars are starting to sing," Dru said, her eyes closed as she listened to something only she could here.

"We're finished here, ducks," the man said, straightening up. "Catch you next time I'm passing through LA."

"Come Spike," Dru said, as she led the man away. He gave me one last look as Dru turned around and hoisted herself up on the ledge of the building, then rolled her hips over the side with the ease of a trained dancer to disappear. Spike, if the name was to be believed, just hopped over the side like it was nothing more than a barricade and disappeared from view.

"That could have been worse," Sammie said as she moved closer.

"At least they're leaving," I said, getting to my feet. I looked down to examine the wound in my chest, and was shocked that the blade had landed right at the bottom of my cleavage just a hairsbreadth away from the zipper. "I wouldn't want to fight that man again for all the blood in the world."

"At least he's gone," Sammie said, putting her arm around me. "So, prince?"

"How about clothes?" I said, thinking I couldn't face the prince looking like this. "I can also try out these new fleshcrafting abilities if you don't fit anything I've got."

"I'll be happy to teach you," she said with a smile. Arm in arm, I shadow-stepped back to the motel with my friend and tried to suppress the chill that I had just been bested in hand to hand combat.

Just who was this Spike guy, anyway?

Author's Note: Yes, I went there, and I have to say, they have magnificent pie.

Hope everyone likes this chapter and it's ending, but I won't know if you don't leave a review!