Vampire: The Masquerade is owned by White Wolf Publishing. My use is in no way meant to challenge their copyrights. This piece is not intended for any profit on the part of the writer, nor is it meant to detract from the commercial viability of the aforementioned copyright. Any similarity to any events or persons, either real or fictional, is coincidental and unintended.
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Chapter 4
I
"Hey, jailer, do I get my phone call or not!" Michelle screamed out, drawing stares from the other women in her cell. Goddamn tank, she cursed silently. She thought it was bad enough that she had managed to get gang-tackled by police, tasered, handcuffed, Mirandized, photographed in her first mug shot, and even fingerprinted by some twit who she guessed was incapable of managing a paper route, to say nothing of being able to competently book a suspect. But being thrown into the tank with a bunch of prostitutes, drunken and surly housewives, and a woman who looked like she was long overdue for a casting call for CSI: Skid Row was the final straw.
"Keep talking, fish," a large, she-man cop growled at her. The cop seemed like she was about to add something else, but then made a big point about turning and walking away, doubtlessly confident that Michelle's cellmates would instruct her in the finer points of jailhouse propriety.
"You can sit down and shut up now, bitch," one of the prostitutes drawled from a bench in the corner. "No one here is impressed."
"So I guess that means you're not gonna give me that student discount?" Michelle guessed sarcastically. She thought the woman might stand and make something of her comment, but she instead gave a satisfied chuckle and fell silent.
Feeling she must have just passed some type of test, Michelle boldly started calling out to the guards who were just out of sight behind the door to the booking area. "Seriously guys, I'd like to make a phone call," she yelled as calmly as she could. Then, turning back to her cellmates, she asked, "Anyone here know what time it is?"
"Probably getting close to four," another prostitute commented. "Why, you got a hot date?"
"Real hot… and I'm not gonna have much of anything if I don't get my goddamn phone call soon." Michelle started padding from one side of the cage to the other, oblivious to how quickly her cellmates cleared out of her path. Sun's gonna be up soon, she reminded herself needlessly. If I'm still in here, I'm screwed. How the hell did it even come to this?
She thought back to the quick assault she and Erica had launched on Horatio and his posse. We should have known from the get-go that it was a trap, she thought angrily, wondering if Johnny or any of his clanmates would have ever been so stupid. I thought I was becoming such the bad-ass strategist, but I'm really still the same old careless girl I always was. If Johnny ever finds out I walked into something so obvious…
She tried to turn away from the memories but failed miserably. No matter how hard she tried, she could not avoid thinking about her and Erica walking right into the motel courtyard, oblivious to the fact that they were sitting ducks to the Sabbat watching from the balconies above. The gunfire was bad enough, but when they started lobbing Molotov cocktails…
Erica had predictably freaked out and run as fast as she could in the opposite direction, but Michelle had held her ground. Actually, that's sorta weird, she decided, wondering why the Rottschreck had not affected her as much as it had the last time she had been faced with fire. Maybe it's some sort of wacky side effect of my fear of the dark; maybe fire – a source of light – doesn't cause the same kind of primal terror it used to.
"Take another step near me and I tear your goddamn ears off," Michelle growled, noticing one of her cellmates slowly shuffling toward her while she thought the Gangrel was distracted with her own thoughts. The other woman immediately started moving in the opposite direction just as slowly and subtlely.
Wow, I think I just made my first jailhouse bitch. This whole prison thing might not be so tough after all. "What time is it now?" she asked everyone and no one.
"About five minutes later than the last time you asked us, cupcake," a fat woman in the corner answered. "You maybe want to sit down and shut up now?"
"How does this work?" Michelle asked, turning to the motley crew of women behind her. "They take us before a judge at some point?"
"Yeah, usually first thing in the morning," an old prostitute responded. "Though I'm pretty sure I heard the J.P. already called in sick or something. Sounds like we'll have to wait until after lunch."
"After lunch?" Michelle asked, feeling about as sick as she ever had since the embrace. "So, like, we're gonna leave and go somewhere else?"
"The courthouse a few blocks away."
"Supposed to be sunny tomorrow, right?"
"Do I look like the fucking weathergirl to you?" the woman barked sarcastically.
"It's gonna be sunny," Michelle muttered. "I'm so screwed…"
…………………………………………………………
II"Any idea where we can find out about recent goings-on?" K.T. asked, vaguely remembering Johnny mentioning once that he had a particularly unpleasant visit to Richmond several years earlier.
"Not a clue," Johnny admitted. "I didn't exactly spend much time in town during my last visit. We could try finding some anarchs again, I suppose, but from what we heard a bunch of mortals were killed this time."
"And that means the powers that be had to have gotten involved."
"Gotta protect the Masquerade at all costs," Johnny agreed. "So we might do better by heading to Elysium somewhere."
"Wherever that is."
"That also means we're gonna have to present ourselves."
"Huh?"
"We have to present ourselves to the prince," Johnny explained. "I know you know about that particular Tradition."
"We don't have time for that bullshit."
"And it's only gonna take us longer if we walk into Elysium and someone stakes us because we're wandering about without having been granted entry," Johnny reasoned. "There are plenty of people who take the Traditions seriously, especially in a town like this, so close to Sabbat strongholds."
"And plenty more who'd just like to get their nuts off staking a couple of visitors," K.T. responded dryly. "Doesn't exactly make one feel welcome."
"Virginia is for lovers, not for gun-toting mercenaries tracking down their trigger-happy, blood-bound companions," Yashida replied.
"Although as possible slogans go, that does have a nice ring to it."
"But it wouldn't fit on a license plate."
"True. Fine, presenting ourselves it is. You happen to know where the prince hangs out in this town?"
"As a matter of fact, I do."
………………………
"That's not exactly the kind of place I had in mind," K.T. commented, glancing down the block at the Legend Brewing Company. The building itself was well maintained, though the local atmosphere left a great deal to be desired. Rather than the buildings creating the bad impression, it was the people. Johnny noticed that the assortment of bikers and leather-wearing street-toughs just didn't seem to belong.
"You ready?" the Telemon asked.
"You're sure he's there, right?"
"Absolutely," Yashida assured his friend. "The one and only problem is going to be figuring out who he is."
"I thought you said you've seen him before."
"That's the thing," Johnny answered hesitantly. "The prince – he goes by the name Clovis, by the way – is a Brujah. He happens to be a master of disguise and has a habit of changing his appearance – both cosmetically and through the use of Obfuscate," the Telemon explained, referring to the set of vampiric skills that included the ability to alter one's apparent appearance. "He looks different every night so that the Sabbat has a harder time identifying him and taking him out."
"That's actually not a bad strategy," K.T. admitted.
"Yeah, but it causes a bit of a problem."
"Of course it does," the Gangrel muttered. "I'm with you, so there will always be problems. It'll never be easy and straightforward, will it?"
"There was that one time in Tuscaloosa," Johnny pointed out. "We managed to get into town, meet the prince, and leave without being shot."
"That hardly counts," K.T. responded without missing a beat. "We got there separately and weren't in the middle of one of these stupid jams we always seem to get into."
"A valid point," Johnny admitted. "Anyway, like I was saying, Clovis's habits cause a problem. See, he's a stickler for the rules, but since he's a Brujah there has to be a chaotic spin on the way he's a stickler; his position is that all bets are off on a visitor until the kindred presents himself."
"Don't even say it," the Gangrel warned, already knowing exactly where Johnny was headed.
"So you see, the Brujah that are screwing around right outside the door-"
"Have free reign to beat the hell out of us in an attempt to stop us from reaching the prince," K.T. grumbled.
"They call it running the gauntlet," Johnny explained, surprised that K.T. had never heard of Richmond's major kindred tourist attraction. "Occasionally it gets a bit rough, and that's what keeps the anarchs coming into town. Also, as a side note, it's an incredibly devious way of getting them to show up at Elysium to present themselves."
"Huh?"
"You seriously haven't heard about any of this?" Johnny asked. "You who seem to embrace the rough and tumble aspect of our lives?"
"I don't hang much with anarchs," K.T. pointed out. "Fact is, most of them can't come close to affording to pay me, and since I'm frequently hired to wipe them out in large numbers I don't see much of a point in making friends."
"Okay," Yashida shrugged. "Then I'll give you the whole 4-1-1. East Coast anarchs are sorta migratory, as you know. A good many of them travel south for the winter, since our bodies generally take on the ambient temperature and freezing solid when going out for a meal isn't exactly fun."
"Doesn't help that fewer people are out on the streets when it gets cold, too."
"Exactly," Johnny agreed. "Anyway, Richmond is in a fairly good region, never getting as cold in the winter as it does just a bit farther north, but rarely getting too hot and steamy, either. Plus, this place is a major rest stop for lots of north-to-south travelers. This is an inevitable hotspot for anarch activity, and the prince knows he can't avoid it. He also knows that the Sabbat is knocking on his door on a regular basis. So he arranged his edicts in such a way as to encourage anarch visitation."
"Well that's different," K.T. commented.
"He needs soldiers, and the anarchs provide that. Clovis has made parts of Richmond – including the street right outside the city's main Elysium – into an anarch playground. There's a sort of tacit understanding that the anarchs will at the very least hint at possible Sabbat incursions, and since many of them have started to call Richmond home, the local non-Sabbat population has grown to a level that holds the Sabbat at bay."
"Except there's no telling if the anarchs will actually stay and fight against a siege," the Gangrel reasoned.
"But why take the time to assemble war parties to test Richmond's defenses and find out just how committed to the city the anarchs are when there are other, more vulnerable cities not far away?" Johnny asked.
"Sure," K.T. said, fully appreciating Clovis's unconventional strategy. Makes complete sense as long as you're willing to have a few dozen uncontrollable, gun-toting neonates wandering around your city."
"I guess he feels avoiding the alternative of falling to the Sabbat is worth the anarch headaches. Besides, he is Brujah," Johnny added. "Fact is, Clovis used to be an anarch, and he understands the one immutable rule of being an anarch."
"Which is?" K.T. asked curiously.
"They never stay anarchs," Johnny answered, "and they almost always come back home to the Camarilla. The ones that survive long enough may play the hell-raising wanderer game for a while, but eventually they get tired of dodging Sabbat packs, Camarilla enforcers, rival anarch gangs, and the occasional garou ambush out on the more remote stretches of road that they travel. Live long enough, and you'll want a bit of security. Clovis reached that point, though I guess he likes being reminded of his rabble-rousing roots."
"Just the type of guy to put in charge of a strategically important city," K.T. said sarcastically. "And to think sometimes I actually wonder how the Camarilla is losing its war."
"Let's forget about all that crap," Yashida muttered. "You got any ideas of how we might be able to make it in there without getting pummeled too badly?"
"I was planning on shooting a bunch of them and just kicking the crap out of the rest," K.T. responded. "What more is there?"
"Well, let's just say that one of us – and I'm not mentioning names, but this would be me – isn't quite as able to shrug off getting shot at point blank range."
"You're faster than any of them," K.T. reasoned. "Just shoot them first and you won't have a problem."
"That's the best advice you can give?" Johnny asked with a laugh. "How in hell did you survive so long?"
"What, you got a better idea?"
"I was thinking we hotwire that garbage truck over there," Johnny said, pointing down a side street. "Then we drive up in that, letting the truck take most of the bullets, and we walk in relatively unscathed."
"I prefer my plan."
"Well how about you do it your way, and I'll do it mine?" Johnny suggested.
"Fine," K.T. answered, stepping off of his Harley and striding confidently down the street.
"Just remember not to kill any of them," Johnny reminded his friend as he got off his Kawasaki and ran over to the garbage truck. "Fighting is one thing, killing is something else entirely."
"Don't worry," K.T. answered. Johnny was certain his friend had added something else, but his words were drowned out by the thunderous report of his Ruger Redhawk.
………………………
"Would you prefer to clean up before we begin the formalities?" Clovis asked, his eyes focused on K.T. The mercenary's customary brown duster contained over a dozen fresh holes, and his faded blue jeans were little better off. Johnny was reminded of comic book characters after epic battles, their costumes all but shredded, the burned, bloodstained tatters barely concealing strategic areas of the body while exposing scrapes, bruises, and sometimes open wounds.
"No, I'm fine," the Gangrel assured the prince. Clovis appeared to be a twenty-something college student, replete with a Richmond Spiders sweatshirt. His bodyguards, three of them seated at the table with him, looked like the prince's pledge brothers. All were in blue jeans and an assortment of sweatshirts and professional sports jerseys.
"And I suppose you're the one who borrowed the garbage truck," Clovis commented, looking at Johnny.
"Yup."
"I would ordinarily congratulate you for making it inside in such better shape than your sidekick, but given the fact that you rolled the truck and spilled tons of municipal waste on the sidewalk outside, I'm going to have to ask that next time you simply sacrifice a small piece of your wardrobe like your friend here." Johnny had barely succeeded in stifling his smile, but then he saw K.T.'s grin. That put him over the edge, and he ended up chuckling in the face of the prince's half-hearted rebuke.
"It is a bit funny, isn't it?" Clovis admitted.
"More fun than funny, I think," Johnny replied. "Fact is, though, that we're here to ask for information, if you have any."
"Really?"
"We've just come up from Pensacola," Johnny said, making certain he kept his story as ambiguous as possible. He knew that Clovis was notoriously uninterested in the games and manipulations of some of his peers, and while that was certain to end in him losing Richmond someday, it was also useful in avoiding getting the third degree himself while digging for info from the prince. "There were some kindred-related shootings there three nights ago, and we think we've been able to track the perpetrators in this direction. We're pretty sure the same ones who shot up Pensacola are the ones that caused so much havoc here last night."
"And?" Clovis asked, sounding both curious and indifferently disinterested at the same time.
"And we're wondering if you could tell us anything useful," K.T. put in, eliciting a roll of the eyes from his friend. "We're on a bit of a timetable here, too, so we would appreciate it if you don't keep us waiting."
"I see," Clovis said, obviously working at restraining himself from ripping off K.T.'s head. "And in Pensacola, do you usually speak this way to the prince?"
"I'm not from Pensacola," K.T. grumbled, making Yashida want to put a bullet in each of the Gangrel's kneecaps. "I'm looking for a friend who's started tracking a Sabbat pack on her own."
"What?" Clovis's eyes had gone wide at K.T.'s words, and Johnny found it impossible to guess what Richmond's prince was thinking.
"Look, I've known guys like you over the years," the Gangrel explained, "though none of them have been princes. You're a toughguy who hates bullshit, so let's dispense with that. My buddy here has a friend who went off on a Sabbat killing spree lately, and while I'm not one to step in the way of someone having a good time, the fact is that his friend got a friend of mine to go along for the ride. One of them's liable to get her head taken off sooner or later, and I'm not in the mood for dealing with that."
"And what do you want of me?" the prince asked. "Please understand that I'm not too inclined to do anything to help the friend of two kindred who managed to get a dozen humans shot – two of them fatally – by stray bullets at a motel shootout. And as if that weren't the worst of it, one of them was arrested; of course, as luck would have it the normal J.P. was sick so they were going to arraign the night's suspects at noon. As you can imagine, I had the District Attorney up at three-thirty in the morning, pulling strings to make sure a half-comatose defendant wouldn't burst into flames while half the court staff is watching on the courthouse's front steps during lunch hour.
"Not that any of my concern and preparation was necessary, though. The second one apparently made a bomb and blew out one of the walls at the police station. Lucky she didn't do that during a shift change, or else I'd probably have a handful of dead cops to cover up. As it is, two are injured, one badly enough that he'll probably get early retirement. Your little friends got away, though."
"Which one was arrested?" K.T. asked evenly.
"The brunette," Clovis answered. "She was tackled by two officers responding to the shooting, and then held down long enough for several other officers to assist and overpower her. Too bad they didn't shoot her; at least that way she could have played dead and just walked out of the morgue quietly like we ask the anarchs to."
"So the blonde made the bomb?" the Gangrel asked, unable to hide his surprise. He had no idea where Erica had learned about explosives, but he made a mental note to find out.
"Blonde bombshell," one of Clovis's bodyguards laughed. The prince directed a scathing look at his guard, and the larger man sat back and seemed concertedly disinterested in the rest of the conversation.
"You wanna skip the bullshit, right?" Clovis asked. "I can do that. If the gang these two were shooting at were really Sabbat, then they've bought themselves a 'Get Out of the Bonfire Free' Card. Just because they aren't gonna be sentenced to death doesn't mean they just walk, though, either. If you find them, I want them back here."
"Oh really?" K.T. asked, his tone sarcastically indicating that he was interested in hearing how the prince thought he was going to enforce that particular edict.
"I want to know what they were doing in my city, and I want to know who these Sabbat were that they were chasing. I also want reparations."
"So that's what it's really about," Johnny commented, finally joining the conversation when he realized that K.T.'s direct approach had finally run its course and it was time to play politics again. "You want to be compensated for the inconvenience they've caused."
"Inconvenience!" the prince asked incredulously. "Is that what you'd call it? I just had a dozen innocent bystanders gunned down and two cops crippled in the ballsiest jailbreak this state's seen in the last fifty years. This isn't a local matter anymore, boys – the feds are comin' into town. They're already here, in fact. My people were busy laying the groundwork for a plausible gang violence cover story when someone at Homeland Security connected the dots and decided that the only possible explanation was a terror cell operating on the doorstep of D.C.
"This isn't going away anytime soon, and while not much will really change on a day-to-day basis, the fact remains that some of my local anarchs are gonna run into trouble given the increased scrutiny, and it's gonna cost me to bail them out."
"And you deserve to be compensated," Yashida commented, feeling K.T.'s eyes turn on him as his own gaze remained riveted on the prince. "My friend and I are not without sympathy for your situation, and we have some resources of our own; is there something we could do that might help you forget everything our friends have done to upset your idyllic calm?"
"You know, you two should be a comedy team or something," Clovis commented as he leaned back with a large, satisfied grin. "The brainless cowboy and the scumbag politician. I think it would play well in the Heartland."
"And maybe we'll take our act on the road once we've done what we can to bail our friends out of trouble," Johnny responded. "I'm sure we can reach some kind of an arrangement."
"Of course we can," Clovis agreed. "Because, as a matter of fact, there is something I'd like to have that I just can't seem to get my hands on; and I think you two might be the perfect volunteers for this particular job."
…………………………………………………………
III"We're gonna be in Pennsylvania pretty soon," Michelle commented as she left I-95 and moved onto I-495, the beltway around Wilmington, Delaware. Erica's words a week earlier kept repeating in her head – 'If he even gets close to New York, we're gonna have to break off and let him go, because I'm not going anywhere near the Sabbat metroplex.' The Sabbat metroplex, as Erica referred to it, began in the Baltimore-D.C. area and continued north to Boston's southern suburbs. I may not be a genius with geography, but I know enough to realize that we're already well within that area, Michelle thought worriedly. She began trying to think of a safe harbor if the two of them were discovered by any large Sabbat packs, but hideouts for Camarilla vampires were few and far between in this region. Their best bet was to take action right where they were, in Wilmington.
Despite Sabbat all around and two very brief falls to Sabbat war parties, Wilmington had been able to survive as a Camarilla city due in large part to local Ventrue banking interests. Simply put, there was just far too much money and influence in Wilmington to walk away. While most Camarilla clans had already cut their losses, accepting the inevitable in Delaware, the Ventrue continued to hold on with the tenacity of a bulldog. Besides the Ventrue, only the Tremere remained, refusing to withdraw as long as it was possible the Ventrue might prevail. The warlocks would never allow the Ventrue to be seen as being made of sterner stuff.
"It's now or never, isn't it?" Erica asked from the passenger seat, her eyes seemingly vacant. When they had continued north from Richmond several nights earlier, Michelle had become temporarily convinced that Erica meant to betray her, that she would end up falling within the clutches of the Sabbat once more. The excruciatingly slow pace they kept over the course of three nights had only fueled her fears, making her suspect that an elaborate trap was being prepared. It had not taken long, though, to put those fears to rest. Erica now possessed two moods – she was either obsessively focused on her prey, or she was possessed by a haunted melancholy. The Ventrue antitribu oscillated unpredictably between the two, and Michelle found herself hoping that Erica would shift again very soon. She needed a fanatical hunter, not a despondent victim.
And that's what she seems like when she gets like that, Michelle decided. She seems like a victim, maybe as much of one as I ever was. The Gangrel found herself wondering yet again what it was that had made Erica decide to leave the Sabbat, though days ago she had resigned herself to the conclusion that she would likely never know. "Yup, it's now or never," Michelle muttered, wishing that Erica had reached that decision about two hundred miles earlier.
Erica sighed deeply, and Michelle saw the mood shift she had been hoping for. "How fast this thing go?" she asked, a wicked grin spreading across her lips as she opened her laptop and pulled up the tracking program she had been using to follow their targets.
"You kidding?" Michelle asked, flooring the gas as she downshifted into fourth. The speedometer of the stolen RX-8 seemed to skip from 60 to 85 as Erica zoomed in on her laptop's map, depicting the position of the GPS beacon affixed to the Sabbats' car. Their target was less than a half-mile ahead, and closing fast.
"They're still going just a shade above the speed limit," Erica announced, knowing that Horatio and his friends would keep the speed down as long as they were in the Wilmington area. The Ventrue always infiltrated the police forces of their cities, and the last thing any Sabbat would want was a traffic stop in a Ventrue city; that was oftentimes the quickest route to death.
"There they are," Michelle said just a minute later, pointing to a Ford Explorer that was driving along in the middle of three lanes. "Take out the tires and we'll see if we can finish them right here."
"In the middle of the interstate?" Erica asked incredulously, looking around and noting that at least there were only two or three other vehicles within sight, given the late hour. "You're kidding, right?"
"Just make sure you don't get hit by a truck or something," Michelle advised. "We'll take them out, get back in the car, and haul ass outta here before any of the locals can show up and fill us with bullet holes."
"Good plan," Erica shouted, her additional, profanity-laced comments swept away by the wind as she climbed halfway out of the passenger side window and leveled an Uzi at her prey's vehicle. Michelle slowed in order to give Erica a better shot, and the sound of gunfire provided a soundtrack to the sight of the Ford Explorer veering sharply right as the driver sought to get away from his attackers. All he succeeded in doing, however, was pulling an unrecommended maneuver at highway speed, placing all of the vehicle's weight on two blown-out tires. Predictably enough, the Explorer rolled, spraying plastic and shards of glass across the asphalt as it lurched over onto the shoulder and down an embankment.
Michelle slammed on the brakes and spun the car around, coming to a stop on the shoulder facing back toward oncoming traffic. She was about to drive the hundred yards back to the battered Explorer when Erica threw the door open and started running toward her old friend and his cohorts. "Wait!" Michelle yelled, finding her seatbelt surprisingly reluctant to open. By the time the Gangrel reached her friend, crouched behind a tree, there was already an unhealthy number of bullets whizzing through the air.
Two of the Sabbat were trapped inside the rear of the Explorer, but four others had managed to crawl out. Two of them were busy keeping Erica and Michelle pinned while the other two pulled at the twisted metal, trying to open a wide enough space for the other two to escape.
"We have to take them out before they're all free of the car," Erica shouted as she stopped firing just long enough to reload her Uzi.
"No we don't," Michelle shouted back. She pulled a grenade out of her pocket and showed it to her friend; Erica seemed to cackle, realizing that the Sabbat had done a perfect job of positioning themselves close enough together that they would all be in the blast radius. Michelle was just about to pull the pin when a shroud of darkness smothered the battle.
To be continued………………………………………